THE WHEEL OF SAMSARA

Wandering Monsters and GNS

2012-01-09T13:14:00.001-05:00

So, Fr. Dave's startlingly acute insight into the role of the Wandering Monster Table got me to thinking (an aside: this is at least the second post that comes from thinking about something that worthy said). Basically, what FD did was take a mental step to the side and look at the concept of the Wandering Monster from a new light. In the comments, I noted that his particular shift of POV made me think of yet another. As I walked around on my afternoon constitutional, I thought more about this and it occurred to me that here is a place where the GNS Theory (which I never hear discussed anymore) might be useful.

I have always had a troubled relationship with Wandering Monsters in Ye Auld Game. I honestly didn't even understand the idea when I started playing and ignored it. Later, I began to understand the idea, but seldom used it because something about it bugged me. I didn't have the conceptual tools to understand why it bothered me; it just did. It is clearer now to me that my problem has something to do with how one answers the question, "Why are these 2d6 Skeletons wandering around here?"

When you look at early dungeons, it is pretty clear that the answer to the above questions is something like, "Because that's a decent encounter for this level of the dungeon." It is an implicitly Gamist concept, in which monster Hit Dice are related to Dungeon Level, and the whole thing has to do discouraging dawdling and noisy war-bands. That's not to say that one could not provide some in-game rationale, but any such rationale would be an ex post facto invention on the part of the Referee and not the intent of the encounter.

That's what truly irritated me about Wandering Monsters because I was, in the GNS Model, a determined Simulationist, trying hard to play in a world that felt "real". I wanted to know why it was skeletons, why it was 2d6 of them, and why they were on this particular level and not another (you couldn't even appeal to idea that monsters stick to levels where they won't get eaten by something tougher, because skeletons don't really have any sense of self-preservation). I wanted a Table that was specifically designed for each locale instead of the endless supply of Giant Rats and Hobgoblins. But trying to put those together was so much work that I usually just gave up entirely.

Now, what strikes me a so damn clever about Fr. Dave's idea is the way it promotes a Narrativist agenda for the Wandering Monster Table. And, yes, I wrote that precisely - it makes the Table itself a player in the game, with agency, and a say in the unfolding narrative. This point-of-view makes it explicit that there is a non-Gamist answer to my question, but still requires the Referee to flesh it out. These might be the only 2d6 Skeletons in the dungeon, or in the world, and if they are destroyed, there aren't any more. Unless, that is, they come up again on the Table, at which point some intriguing narrative is surely unfolding: are the skeletons unkillable, rising up again a few hours after being destroyed? Is there an enthusiastic necromancer just ahead of the party, practicing his art to keep them delayed? Are the skeletons the unquiet remnants of living monsters killed by the party, chasing them for revenge?

I don't know, but suddenly the whole enterprise seems so much more interesting to me.

How Does AD&D Suck?

2012-01-06T11:04:00.000-05:00

The other day, the estimable Jeff Rients made a near-perfect little haiku of a post: What Part of AD&D Sucks the Most? With a mere 39 words, he conjured a gigantic debate that sprawled out to 72 posts at the time I write this. As a writer marked by prolixity, I admire anyone who can inspire such thought with so few words. This post was originally to be a comment on Jeff's blog, but given the vast number of existing comments, as well as my own need to be more verbose than commenting easily allows, I make it a post of my own instead.

In my comment to Jeff, I said this:

Damn! That's hard. Like...maybe impossible to answer hard. I'm tempted to go "Other - Percentile Strength", but I have to think more. Certainly, the way Level Limits and spell components were handled kinda sucked, as did segments in initiative.

Man. And yet I loved that game for a long time.

Reading the later comments, I began to see just why I found this question so difficult. Like any good piece of writing, there is more than one thought buried in Jeff's question. There are at least two: which ideas sucked (rationale) and which implementations (rule) sucked? These can be very different questions with very different answers.

The hottest topic in the comments related to Demi-Human Level Limits and I read most of them as saying that the implementation sucked. The idea behind it is generally agreed to be something like "to provide a weakness to demi-humans to balance out their advantages viz a viz humans" or "to provide a rationale as to why demi-humans don't rule the world". Most commenters had no issue with the idea and, indeed, suggested various alternate implementation that would suck less. I'll note, in passing, that both a commenter named Timrod and Jeff himself appear to have the absolute converse opinion: that the rule is a wonderful implementation of a completely different rationale. They are alone in this so far as I can tell.

The analysis holds true for most of the other suggestions. No one really opposes ideas such as grappling rules or initiative, but rather the implementations of them. A few exceptions: I think the objections to gender-based stat restrictions and training to level up is an opposition to the idea itself. One might expect someone to object to the idea of psionics, but I haven't seen one (nor, obviously, would I agree with it, but it would be a fair opinion to hold). I'm not sure if the objections to Weapon vs. Armour Class are calling the rationale or the rule sucky. Alert, hypothetical, long-time readers of this blog know that I find the idea of Weapon vs. AC very good indeed and have laboured long and hard to find an implementation that suits me.

What does all that mean? Well, it explains what seemed such a paradox to me: why did I love a game that sucked so much? The answer is that, by and large, it was specific rules I disliked and not the underlying ideas. And for a person who likes tinkering, "fixing" mechanics is not necessarily a bad thing to do.

Finally, my thinking confirms for me that I choose Percentile Strength as my suckiest part, but I had to think hard why that was. The thing is that a lot of the sucky rules are so damn easy to ignore that they hardly even count in my book. Did the grappling rules suck? Sure did, but I never met a person who even bothered to read them twice. You could easily forget they existed and get on with the game. Ditto gender restrictions and helment rules et. al. But Percentile Strength was so in one's face. It was not buried in the middle of the DMG; it right up front in the PH where every damn player would see it at CharGen. You couldn't ignore it. You could house-rule it out, but that's not the same thing. And the implications of it, as others noted in the comments, were profound for changing the perceived need for "good stats".

All that said, I still think this is another example of a sucky implementation and not a sucky idea. If the idea is "to provide for a privileged relationship to Strength for Fighters", then I have no problem with that. Both Spellcraft & Swordplay and Castles & Crusades provide nice rules to address that idea. However, I have to say that my favourite is something I cooked up myself, which was cut from Under the Dying Sun only because I chose to go with One-Roll Combat. If I ran another game with more standard combat I would use this idea: anyone gets a bonus to damage from exceptional Strength, but only Fighters get a matching bonus on the "to hit" roll as they are trained to use their strength to its best advantage. I think that's a rather elegant rule.

Best Laid Plans...

2011-12-28T13:11:00.000-05:00

Obviously, I have not kept up my recent plan of posting once a week. Blame a combination of my son's pneumonia (all better now, thanks) and the holidays. I hope to get back on track soon; let's say starting next week.

Magic in the Enchanted Isles, Part 1: Introductory Materials

2011-12-13T18:30:00.000-05:00

In my initial post on Wizards, I may not have emphasized one of the key appeals to me. Just like the name says on the box, the game is about playing a wizard. It really doesn't take much more than that to interest me. I see a number of posts on rpg.net from people who want "historical" games with no magic. Not me; I want magic (in it's broadest sense, which includes psychic powers and super-powers and Jedi and whatnot) in every game I play. Two of my favourite books of all time are A Wizard of Earthsea and The Dark is Rising, both of which are about boys who find themselves to be magical (my other favourite is A Princess of Mars, which would be only that much better if Burroughs hadn't lost interest in the telepathy part of the story early on). And more than just being a wizard, in Wizards you get to choose whether to be a Wizard, a Sorcerer, or a Druid. That plenitude of magic was just irresistible to young me and remains so to old me (also part of why I loved Stephan Michael Secchi's The Compleat Enchanter and even more loved his Arcanum).

Thus, while I could approach this project in lots of ways, working on the magic is the natural place for me to start. My jumping off point will be what we learn from the board-game on each Magical Order and then start extrapolating from there. I'm also going to start playing around with some ideas for mechanics. I should mention that I'm very undecided on the system I want to use, but two are calling to me at the moment:

Some iteration of Ye Auld Game (probably Spellcraft & Swordplay) + the magic of my beloved Arcanum
Runequest II/Legend

The appeal of No. 1 should be fairly obvious. The appeal of No. 2 is two-fold: not only do Combat Maneuvers rock at providing a "warrior alternative" (to quote an old article about an entirely different game), but it has great, distinct magic systems that could really handle differentiating the Orders. So, for now at least, my thoughts on mechanics will be for both systems.

My biggest goal is to figure out a way to distinguish the various magics from each other in both cause (which the game sort of does) and effect (which it barely does at all). Regarding the former, the game gives us some information in the Introduction, a tiny bit more in the spell lists, and some implicit suggestions via the advancement mechanic. Regarding that last one: Wizards uses a simple, level-based advancement, in which you accumulate three different types of experience points: Knowledge, Power, and Perception. Each of the three Orders prioritizes one of these types of XP and requires that for advancement. These points have no other effect in the board-game, as expected, but I want them to be more meaningful in this rpg-version.

Post-script: Yeah, I said that the next post was going to be about my previous experience rping in the Enchanted Isles. I'll probably get back to that later, but it isn't, maybe, as interesting to anyone else as I had initially thought.

World-Building for One, or No One Cares About Your Stupid, Made-up Calendar Except You (And That's OK)

2011-12-08T15:58:00.000-05:00

I have been thinking a lot about world-building as I work on this Wizards project. World-building is one of those excrescences of gaming that the OSR has ruthlessly attacked. It was a necessary thing. There was a time when you couldn't have "proper" setting without a third-rate rip-off of Tolkien cosmology and a stupid, made-up calendar that was basically the modern calendar with silly names on all the months (I'm so looking at the Mystaran Gazetteers here, as much as I like some of them). I, myself, was an awful perpetrator of this back in the later part of my first gaming cycle (mid-to-late 80's). How I slaved to create a living, alien world and how I grew frustrated when the players refused to appreciate the beauty of my work. They wouldn't even use the names of my stupid, made-up calendar! So, I get the attack on the world-building.

Yet, sometimes I feel it goes too far. A necessary corrective at one point, perhaps, but one that could be reined in a bit now. The dirty little not-so-secret about world-building is this: it's fun. And, as Dr. Seuss tells, us, fun is good; particularly when you are playing a game. The real problem with world-building is not the creative part, but rather knowing your audience. And I'll set this out in bold, by itself:

World-building is fun for you, the GM, and no one else.

World-building has an audience of exactly one and as long as you remember that, there's no problem. When I set up my Onderland Campaign, I was still a bit shy about world-building. But after a while, I realized that I was deliberately stopping myself from having fun, just because I thought I shouldn't do it. That's when the real magic of a wiki hit me: I could happily let loose my creative energies, as long as I made clear to the players that they are not expected to read any of it. Wait, let me set that one out too:

The Players are not expected to read any of my world-building stuff.

The setting had a simple pitch that I could explain in a few sentences and that should be sufficient to get the players going. That's not to say that they can't read the setting materials; I'm not advocating that. If the player like reading your Silmarilion-hack, they can go for it. But, in my experience, very few players really do. Thus, the wonder of a wiki, where you can make all that information available, without actually handing your players a big stack of paper and saying, "Please read Customs of the Aardvarkians by game time next Saturday so that you know what's going on."

Now, I think there are a lot of GM's out there who really don't need to do world-building. Particularly the gonzo-style settings where a new player asks to be a robot and sure, why not, let's have robots in this game. I can admire those settings and even enjoy playing in them, but I absolutely can not run that kind of setting. My brain is too classical and not baroque and I have to be able to tell myself why something is there in order to run it. It's why I can't do random dungeons with all those awesome geomorphs that guys like Dyson Logos have been coming up with. I admire the hell out of them, but I can't run a dungeon that is assembled like that and has goblins next to zombies next to dragons without knowing why those guys are there.

World-building, then, is both fun and necessary for me. So, expect to see some world-building as I try to make sense of the Enchanted Isles, but feel under no compulsion to read it. There will be no pop-quiz next Frizzles-day.

A Little Lyonesse in the Enchanted Isles, or There Sure Are a lot of Funky Characters Wandering Around

2011-12-08T09:26:00.001-05:00

I've begun work on compiling the information on the Wizard's setting as gleaned from the Task and Event Cards of the board-game. As I mentioned before, these cards have a ridiculous amount of setting material which is all useless in the board-game, but nifty from a role-playing perspective. I haven't gotten anywhere near to finishing yet, but I have already made one surprise observation: there are a bunch of funky characters wandering around the Enchanted Isles. A couple of selections from the Event Cards, more-or-less at random:

Lewmiss of the Seven Tales (who gives you understanding of Tree Spirits)
Hesbodel the Waywarder (who gives you the speed of eagles when traveling overland)
Dignol, the Serpentheaded Sage (who, in jealousy, casts you into an undefined trap)
Higor and Brenna (who deceive your mind with foolish intent)
Feliman and Regerian, the Brothers of the Time Flow (who increase your pace)

In my memory of the game, most of the people who show up are Elflords or spirits, but reading these with a fresh eye, they sure sound an awful lot like a magical crew from a Jack Vance story. I'm beginning to think that Vance's Lyonesse may play a role in this setting, right alongside Tolkien's Middle-Earth and Le Guin's Earthsea. Hmn, I just reread A Wizard of Earthsea for this project, maybe I need to reread some Lyonesse too?

Kill the Cleric, Keep the Paladin; or Measuring Classes by Characteristic Function

2011-12-07T12:25:00.000-05:00

Many moons ago, back when the OSR was convulsed with whether or not the Thief class had any business being in the game, I declared a policy of Keep the Thief; Kill the Cleric. That particular debate seems to have been rather settled now, with Thieves pretty comfortably ensconced in Ye Auld Game once again and I have been pretty happy without Clerics. And then Fr. Dave and Roger the GS have to go muddying the waters again.

First, Fr Dave points out that the concept of the Biblical Prophet makes a good model for the Cleric. Then, Roger picks up the idea and runs with it. And it's all sounding pretty darn good if you happen to run a game in which there is some kind of good deity who gives miracles to his chosen ones. Which isn't appropriate for a lot of the more Sword & Sorcery approach that a lot of the OSR favours, but I think Fr. Dave has shown how you can get the two to mesh if you want.

All of this made me remember what I was doing right before I killed the poor Clerics. I was rather down on them, but hadn't yet erased them from existence when I started the Onderland Campaign and I had a player who wanted to run one. So, I made a rather simple little change that worked wonders for me: I changed the name from "Cleric" to "Champion" (I chose Champion, incidentally, so that I could still use the abbreviation "C"). Having made the name change, the idea followed:

Certain individuals feel the call of the Higher Powers and dedicate themselves to becoming holy warriors for their chosen cause. These people are Champions. Examples include the original Knights Templar, the historical Assassins, the literary Paladins of Charlemagne, and the more romantic notions of the Round Table Knights. Their modes of action may differ – some Champions seek to convert the unbelievers, others attempt to aid the faithful (sometimes, even the unfaithful), whiles still others see themselves as defenders of some institution or ideal.

A 1st level Champion is a person who feels that they are called by some Higher Power to embark upon a life of crusading. Upon reaching 2nd level, their calling is verified by the acquisition of miraculous abilities (divine spells). Thus, Champions can only be aligned with Law or Chaos, the two powers of the cosmos. Only humans can become Champions; other species lack the peculiar crusading zeal of humans.

While some Champions are ordained priests, many are not. Conversely, the vast majority of priests are Normal Men. Champions appear from all walks of life: peasants, merchants, and kings. While many Champions join an order of like-minded peers, they need not do so.

My model was obviously medieval, rather than the Biblical, but the idea of the Champion is pretty similar to that of the Prophet as Fr. Dave and Roger are discussing (which is not me claiming any precedence or anything; they have done a much better job of it anyway). I realize now I should have mentioned Joan of Arc in my description for a variety of reasons, such as illuminating the gender opportunities and providing a great example of a Champion who is at cross-purposes with the clergy.

What I still don't like about the Champion is the matter of clerical spells. There is something conceptually off-putting to me about clerical spells. It feels wrong on a gut level. But, more than that, it feels wrong on a game design level. To illustrate that, I'm going to engage in some analysis of class design in YAG. What I'm analyzing is characteristic function; that is, what the class does that defines it. How I'm going to analyze it is by measuring the characteristic function in two ways: variety and frequency.

Let's start with the Fighter. In plain language, his characteristic function is hitting things (usually with weapons, but not always); that is his raison d'être from a design perspective. Although one may hit something in a variety of ways with a variety of means, the Fighter's function nevertheless is low on the variety scale; it's all, essentially, of a kind.

The Wizard's characteristic function is to make magic (generally, though not exclusively, by casting spells). And the essential nature of magic in YAG is that it is totally and completely incoherent. What I mean is that you can't reduce YAG's spell lists into any kind of neat and tidy order. It is what frustrates every attempt I have ever seen to render the spells via an effects-based (and thus logical) mechanic. Spells do so many different things in the game and Wizards get access to them in no logical order. Even spell level is a kludge at most: Charm Person is a ridiculously powerful spell that remains ridiculously powerful throughout the game. Sleep is equally, if not more effective at 1st level, but quickly loses most of its utility in an adventuring environment.

It might not be too much to say that the Wizard's function is to be varietous; in any case, we can safely say that his function measures very high in that area.

But, when we turn to frequency, the tables are turned. Wizards are severely limited in the number of times they may use their spells; they are similarly limited by scrolls, wands, etc. Fighters, on the other hand, can theoretically hit things all day long. There are some common-sense limits to that, of course, and Hit Points provide a sort of practical limit (assuming the thing being hit can hit back), but, in theory, the hitting can go on forever.

So the two classes, Fighter and Wizard, measure on the extremes of the two scales being used. This suggests that one way to design a third class would be to have one that measures near the middle on both scales. That's not the only way to do it, but if you crave symmetry in design the way I do, it makes sense.

Traditional Clerical spells certainly fit somewhere between Wizard spells and hitting things on the variety scale, being much more limited in scope than sorcery, but wider than the Fighters options. Still, I think they hew closer to the Wizard than is symmetrical. And they are, depending upon the edition you play, at least as limited in frequency as Wizards.

But leaving the Cleric where I had already consigned him, we come upon his successor, the Paladin. As I wrote in that original post, "I’d argue that the role [of the Cleric] is so nebulous that even Gary and folks didn’t get it, because the Paladin came about very quickly and that class is much more aligned with Archbishop Turpin and the Knights Templar and whatnot." When I wrote that, I was advocating dumping Clerics rather than using Paladins, but now I'm reading it differently. The nice thing about the Paladin is that his powers are less varietous than the Wizard's spells, but can be used more often. The bad thing about the Paladin as written, is that he has no real characteristic function, being more of a Fighter-Plus than his own thing.

But we don't have to go that way. Look at Roger's One-Sheet for Priests and substitute "Paladin" or "Champion" or "Prophet". And things begin to look mighty symmetrical to me. Also, notice the beauty of Roger's Abjure Evil ability. I think that is the best iteration of Turning that I have ever seen, being infinitely more representative of the source materials (Peter Cushing never disintegrated any vampires with his cross in the films I saw) and subtly asking the Referee to think I a bit about his world (what constitutes an "evil being"? It will vary from campaign to campaign and that's good).

Finally, it occurs to me that all of the above may have even wider application. Because if you are hewing to the measurements I have used above, nothing actually requires that your third class be a spiritual warrior. On the one hand, many iterations of the Thief fit into this scheme just as well (more characteristic variety than the Fighter, but less frequency, albeit due more to practicalities than game mechanics); but, on the other hand, so could something like a Jedi (somebody posted a B/X Psychic Knight class, once; I thought it was JB, but I guess I misremembered so no link). And nothing says you can't have all three - Thief, Champion, and Jedi - in your game. That's still symmetrical, so it's cool.

Gaming in the Enchanted Isles, or Part Two: Why Game There?

2011-12-01T16:04:00.000-05:00

In our first thrilling installment, I discussed some of the reasons why a person - or, at least, a gamer - might want to explore the Enchanted Isles in some way beyond the route provided by the board-game. Although I implied that rpging would be a interesting way to do that, that isn't quite the same thing as saying why you would actually want to use Wizards as the basis of an rpg campaign. I'm not sure that there is anything like a full answer to that, but I can explain some of the reasons why I want to game in the setting.

The first is tone. As I discussed previously, the game has a very strong tone that makes the Isles feel distinct. I use distinct here very deliberately rather than unique, because they are not the latter. The borrowings from Tolkien are many and, unlike OD&D, much more than just names on which to hang monsters. The influence from Le Guin is a bit less strong, but potent nonetheless. Indeed, the feel of the Isles is almost the point where Middle-earth meets Earthsea. For example, the idea that violence is not a a solution to spiritual problems comes from both sources, even if they are represented rather differently in LOTR than the Earthsea books.

All game settings, whatever their origin, have to find some place of balance between freshness and familiarity. There is no right point of balance, of course; it's something each group works out in each game, but it does have to be worked out. Go too far toward the familiar and you feel as if you are just rehashing tired cliches; too far toward the fresh, and you risk losing any sense of confidence. The former point is pretty obvious, I think; for the latter, go check out the scores of threads at rpg.net in which people proclaim the brilliance of Nobilis or Transhuman Space and then say, "Now what the hell do I do with this game?" Much like the topoi of oral-tradition poets, recognizable tropes are places for the players to hang their imaginative hats (if that metaphor isn't too wildly mixed to make sense).

I think the tone of the Isles strikes an attractive balance point. The spirituality of Tolkien without the concomitant baggage of both backstory and end-story is appealing i.e. it would be fun to play with Elflords, making magic with the music of stars, without knowing that this guy has 300-pages of convoluted family history and gets killed at the Battle of Dagorlad. Le Guin's poetic magic is also great fun, but it would be nice to play it without the various constraints or the authour's occasional politics. And the tone is broad enough - maybe with a little help from the GM - to accomodate more types of game play than the airy-fairy stuff that the above might suggest.

Alert, hypothetical readers might well wonder if this tone isn't grossly at odds with the Sword & Sorcery genre the authour frequently bathers on about. And, of course, it is. Wizards is Epic Fantasy in most of its glory. It is not a setting where scoundrels plot money-making schemes from back alleys of baroque city-states. For one thing, there is only one city in the whole setting and Torwall isn't really much of a city. For another, you can't play a scoundrel. Or a rogue. Or a cut-purse. Instead, the game is about the battle for Good and Evil in the cosmos which mirrors the internal, spiritual battle of men (or Men to use the game's fervent capitalizations). It's about doing good deeds and learning to become something better. It's not anywhere near S&S; when you want to play that, go visit the lands under the the Dying Sun. ;)

Which brings me to another reason to use Wizards is the premise. The game gives you the Big Story right up front: the Evil Spirit seeks to finally take over and corrupt the Isles; go stop it. And it gives you some basic directions on how to get involved: stop being a schmuck, join a Magical Order, and become powerful enough to assemble the Sacred Gem. And then it pretty much leaves you alone. Game play on the board literally places you somewhere random and asks "what you do next?" I don't know about you, but that sure sounds sandboxy to me.

The first rounds of the game are spent deciding (or randomly wandering and not deciding) how to join an Order. Do you try to enter one of the forboding Sorcerer's Towers or journey to the Sacred Circle or do you randomly bump into a High Wizard and get initiated? Nothing actually requires you to join any Orders, except that you know you can't get anywhere in the game otherwise (not necessarily true in an rpg though, he says in a bout of foreshadowing).

Subsequent rounds forming the bulk of the game involve the characters picking up various Task cards, which are, in essence, adventure hooks. In every game I have ever played, I wind up with far more Tasks than I could ever complete and thus each game is unique in that you almost never do the same things twice. In the board game, of course, this has a down-side in that the Tasks are really so much useless flavour, but that isn't true if you were playing an rpg (look! more foreshadowing).

The end-game is supposed to revolve around collecting the MacGuffin and thwarting evil. But, again, nothing forces you to. As the game goes on, Evil will begin to pick up strength and, starting on the third fortnight, will commence attacking vulnerable territories. The assault can be staved off by completing Tasks, but Evil will keep coming back and usually with more force. So, if you want to win, it's obvious that you ought to level up and get the MacGuffin, but if you would rather just Transport around randomly, dispelling Demons (and gaining points in the process) like a reenactment of the Gospel of Mark, then you can (I should know, since I have often done that, invariably resulting in me naming my character "the Goddam Sheriff"). And in an rpg....

Finally, one a little less rational: there's just something attractive about turning evocative board games into rpgs. I don't really know why, unless it's the fucntional yet attractive maps, since maps are important to most gamers. Jeff Rients at Jeff's Gameblog has written about this for the Minaria of Divine Right. JB at B/X Blackrazor discussed it in regards to the Pern of DragonRiders of Pern. And Aaron at A Paladin in Citadel has written more posts on Magic Realm than any other human being in history. So, I feel I'm in good company here.

Also, I'm not just speaking hypothetically in all of this. You see, I myself have adventured among the Enchanted Isles already. But that is a story for our next installment.

Gaming In the Enchanted Isles of Avalon Hill's Wizards (Part 1)

2011-11-30T12:43:00.000-05:00

Avalon Hill put out the board-game Wizards in 1982, which would have been a year or two after I started gaming. I have no idea how my Mom decided to get it for me as a Christmas present, but it was probably one of the best she ever got. After RISK, Wizards is surely my most-played board-game (with The Awful Green Things from Outer Space and the mini-game Saga coming somewhere after). Wizards was the first board-game I had ever played that had both cooperative and competitive play: everybody is trying to get the MacGuffin and drive off the Bad Guy, but everybody wants to be the one who does it.

But more explanatory of it's appeal to me at the time was the flavour of the game. That link above to BoardGameGeek has a pdf of the rules booklet; if you've never seen it, check it out and see what I mean. The setting is a sort of combination of Tolkien Middle-Earth, Le Guin's Earthsea, and...something. The Designer's Notes make it clear that they (a husband and wife, maybe?) thought of the game as some kind of magic, poetic ritual in-itself, which, whatever you think of that, gives the game part of it's unique charm. It also means that the game is full of detail and colour that is absolutely unnecessary to playing it as a board game, but which tend to make the wheels in the head of a role-player start turning.

For example, the game board is composed of eighteen hex-tiles (6x6) that are randomly placed at the beginning of play. Six of these are Common (i.e. human), six are Elven, and six are Magic. You really don't need to know anything about these territories, by and large, and yet each one gets a paragraph write-up in the booklet, such as:

Elven Territory VI - Woodland
Here dwells the the Elflord Finrel, wisest of all Elves, with his Elflady Vawn, the Spice of the Islands. Together, they sustain the Richness and Fertility of the land. The Wise Woman Hamdrel, who favours all woodland dwellers, keeps close ties with these Elves and encourages their Life-giving Magic.

Aside from obvious Tolkien riffs, note also that those portentous capitalizations (Richness, Magic) are as written. Also, remember that nothing in there matters one little bit for purposes of playing the game as written. Even the incredibly boring human places (so boring that they are officially termed "Common Territories", rather than "Human Territories", get little details:

Common Territory II - Woodswall
When these Men began to mistrust the woods, where the Elves tended to dwell, they built walls between the woods and their towns. Due to these walls, the Men of Woodswall have been forced to look outward to the sea. They have become great fishermen, knowing much of the waterways.

Those three sentences have a lot of compressed back-story in there that could be mined for ideas if one wanted to do something other than just play the board game. Why did Men begin to distrust the woods? Are there Elves in the woods near Woodswall now? Were there then? What's the state of relations between the two today?

Another example. There are seven High Wizards in the game, who are definitely of the Tolkienian angelic variety and, Saruman-like, one has become evil, or, as the game terms it, a False Wizard. I love that term, by the way; although you could take it to mean simply that he is false i.e. untruthful, I prefer to think it means that a real Wizard is, by definition, a servant of the Good Power and that the traitor has made himself a fake. I think JRRT would approve of that. Anyway, in game-play, the High Wizards are just encounters that can do stuff for you and it really doesn't matter whether you meet Ishkatar, Aevarex, or Elekov (except in the end game it matters if you meet the False Wizard). Yet, each High Wizard gets a unique staff design (check out the box cover above for two of them) and an evocative description in the book. I mentioned three of them above, so here are their write-ups:

Ishkatar - Wise Lord of the High Wizards, possessor of Knowledge and Understanding, seeing and hearing hidden things, Ishkatar is the greatest of all beings who inhabit the Enchanted Isles.

Aevarex - Righteousness, Truth, and Purity are the source of the wisdom of Aevarex, fairest of the High Wizards, Healer of Harms.

Elekov - Elekov the Mighty. He is unsurpassed in the wise use of magical powers and honours the strength of even the humblest objects.

Finally, I have to mention the amazing art, all by one of game's designers, which the Designer's Notes say isn't just intended as illustration, but as window into the world (pretentious, perhaps, but not inaccurate). I don't have the useful software these days to clip out pictures from the book, but go check out that link and look at Sorcerer's Spell (p13), the Doug Henningesque Wizard in Telepthy (p15), or The Elflord's Revenge by the Power's of Finrel, Hispan, and Havor (p17). Like the style or not (I largely do), it does, in fact, give you a window into the setting. I love, for instance, that skull-cap on the sorcerer.

I haven't even discussed the Task Cards yet, which give a lot more information on the setting, but I think the point is clear enough: Wizards oozes a certain flavour which would go well with role-playing (the chocolate to rpging's peanut butter, perhaps). That's certainly how it felt to me back then and is surely one of the reasons I played the game so often, because the game-as-board-game has some serious defects.

Most notoriously, it has a very draggy end-game in which the characters, who have spent the whole game to the this point sailing all around the Isles, performing Tasks, suddenly stop moving and just pick cards and/or roll dice to try and get the MacGuffin together, then do the same to try and take the MacGuffin home. I can recall getting very frustrated many times by having my character stuck outside the Sacred Circle, trying to roll the number I needed to get in and hand the damn WMD to the High Druid, who supposedly wanted it, but can't be bother to get off his arse and step outside to get the thing.

A less obvious deficiency, and maybe one that wouldn't exist for pure board gamers, is that the abundance of flavour is tied to mechanics which don't support it. All that cool stuff I spoke about above, which is nifty but doesn't impact play, doesn't even work in play sometimes. The one that always irritated me were the three Magical Orders. Early game-play involves the characters trying to be initiated into one of the three Orders, each of which is given a very distinct origin and spin: the Wizards learn from the angelic High Wizards and seek Knowledge; the Sorcerers learn elemental Arts originally taught by the evil Dragons and seek Power; and the Druids seek to recreate the magic of the Druidic race, a virtually extinct people born of Humans, Elves, and High Wizards who sought Perception (incidentally, this implies the High Wizards of the Enchanted Isles are not the essentially-sexless manikins of Tolkien).

Now all that is cool, except that whatever Order you join, you still learn the same damn magics. There are three Movement spells (Boat Summoning, Swiftness, and Transporting i.e. Teleportation) and four Encounter spells (Animal Summoning, Demon Dispelling, Dragon Taming, and Escaping, which last is surely the less used spell in the game, doing nothing much of interest). True, each Order does get one Special spell at Rank Four (the highest Rank and the beginning of the end-game), but both the Wizard's Telepathy and the Sorcerer's Gem Summoning do pretty much the same thing (give the player a chance to get a piece of the MacGuffin). While Wizards, Sorcerers, and Druids get a little variety in when they acquire the spells and at what strength (Druids can Demon Dispel sooner, while Sorcerers get more range on Boat Summoning), it's not much and by Rank Four there isn't any real distinction left.

So, what is a poor gamer to do in such a situation? Well, let's talk about that in our next, enthralling installment.

The Blood of Belshazzar as a Sword & Sorcery RPG Premise

2011-11-27T13:29:00.000-05:00

Sword & Sorcery is experiencing a bit of a comeback in rpging these days. I've mentioned two very excellent games previously: Barbarians of Lemuria and Jaws of the Six Serpents. Thulsa has done some amazing Hyborian Age conversions of classic adventures, such as Shrine of the Kuo-Toa and Vault of the Drow, as well as some well-regarded original works, such as The Spider-God's Bride and Song of the Beast-Gods (neither of which I have, but intend to rectify that soonishly). And that's just the tip of the sword, not including the mood among the OSR that now leans toward S&S scoundrels and highjinks and away from the Epic Fantasy heroes and grand destinies.

But S&S as a literary genre does present some problems for gaming. I'm speaking here of what might be called "the high end" of the S&S protagonist spectrum; that is, those stories that are about powerful, capable Heroes (in the original, Hellenic sense of the word). This is as opposed to those protagonists who congregate about "the low end" of the spectrum; that motley assortment of ne'er-do-wells and crooks who populate the thieves' quarters of the imagination and who, one might say, descend from Clark Ashton Smith's Satampra Zeiros (spiritual father to D&D adventurers everywhere), rather than Robert E. Howard's King Kull of Valusia.

It's relatively easy to find a gaming premise for this second sort and, indeed, most of the OSR has rediscovered it: a bunch of desperate chaps face magic and monsters in pursuit of loot. The former group is trickier. Imagine trying to play a game where you have King Conan, Elric of Melnibone, and Kane the Killer as your party. Fascinating, yes, but what the hell do they do together? Whatever they decide to do, they do not meet in a tavern and decide to bash the local dungeon for profit.

One solution is to drop the idea of "the party" as the part of the protagonist in the literature is more usually a one- or two-man show. Conan never called for a cleric and Fafhrd and the Mouser are pretty-much a three's-a-crowd act (except Oort the Mingol, I guess). That's fine but pretty much requires losing most of your players (assuming you have a regularly-sized group). And it still doesn't actually give you a premise.

Thus I was struck the other day as I read, for the first time, REH's The Blood of Belshazzar, originally published in 1931, but which I read in the excellent Lord of Samarcand and Other Adventures Stories of the Old Orient. I consider myself a Howard fan, and have read all the Conan, Kull, and Solomon Kane stories, but I had never read any of his Oriental Adventures tales; a situation which I have gladly changed. The Blood of Belshazzar is actually one of the weaker stories in the collection; a not-too gripping murder mystery which does not even have the advantage of The God in the Bowl's giant snake. Which may show, once again, that literary merit is not identical with gaming merit, because it seems to me a wonderful premise for a "high end" S&S game.

Without going into too much detail, the story is set within the lair of a notorious bandit chief, who has collected together the worst of the worst as his lieutenants. None of them trust one another, but all try to retain the good graces of the chief for one reason: the lust after the fabulous gem he owns. Howard writes:

"How do you hold supremacy over these wolves?" asked Cormac bluntly.

Skol laughed and drank once more.

"I have something each wishes. They hate each other; I play them against one another. I hold the key to the plot. They do not trust each other enough to move against me. I am Skol Abdhur! Men are puppets to dance on my strings. And women"--a vagrant and curious glint stole into his eyes--"women are food for the gods," he said strangely.

The story of the gem is perhaps the high-light of the tale and the thing is described in terms startlingly reminiscent of the One Ring in Tolkien:

"Then Belshazzar's lords entreated him to throw the gem back into the sea, for it was evident that it was the treasure of the djinn of the sea, but the king was as one mad, gazing into the crimson deeps of the ruby, and he shook his head.

"And lo, soon evil came upon him, for the Persians broke his kingdom, and Cyrus, looting the dying monarch, wrested from his bosom the great ruby which seemed so gory in the light of the burning palace that the soldiers shouted: 'Lo, it is the heart's blood of Belshazzar!' And so men came to call the gem the Blood of Belshazzar.

"Blood followed its course. When Cyrus fell on the Jaxartes, Queen Tomyris seized the jewel and for a time it gleamed on the naked bosom of the Scythian queen. But she was despoiled of it by a rebel general; in a battle against the Persians he fell and it went into the hands of Cambyses, who carried it with him into Egypt, where a priest of Bast stole it. A Numidian mercenary murdered him for it, and by devious ways it came back to Persia once more. It gleamed on Xerxes' crown when he watched his army destroyed at Salamis.

"Alexander took it from the corpse of Darius and on the Macedonian's corselet its gleams lighted the road to India. A chance sword blow struck it from his breastplate in a battle on the Indus and for centuries the Blood of Belshazzar was lost to sight. Somewhere far to the east, we know, its gleams shone on a road of blood and rapine, and men slew men and dishonored women for it. For it, as of old, women gave up their virtue, men their lives and kings their crowns.

"But at last its road turned to the west once more, and I took it from the body of a Turkoman chief I slew in a raid far to the east. How he came by it, I do not know. But now it is mine!"

Skol was drunk; his eyes blazed with inhuman passion; more and more he seemed like some foul bird of prey.

It is my balance of power! Men come to me from palace and hovel, each hoping to have the Blood of Belshazzar for his own. I play them against each other. If one should slay me for it, the others would instantly cut him to pieces to gain it. They distrust each other too much to combine against me. And who would share the gem with another?

The plot kicks into gear as our protagonist enters as a new lieutenant, the bandit chief is killed, the gem disappears, and all hell breaks lose.

I think that this would make a fantastic starting point for a game, providing a shape of what stories could be told, but giving the players fairly free reign to take that story wherever they wish. Do they team-up and try to keep the gang together, perhaps establishing themselves as true political powers in the region? Do they play the other villains (including, potentially, the other PC's) off one another? Or do they bring the whole situation crashing down in blood and fire and ride off, laughing, into the night? And, as each PC would have his or her own reasons for being there in the first place, the players and GM both would have this great stew of motivations, both complementary and conflicting, with which to play.

You needn't be restrained by the device of the gem - anything could serve as The Most Fabulous Thing in the World. I'd be tempted to do more with foul rituals hinted at by Skol in his likening of women to food for the gods (if this had been a Conan tale, I'm pretty sure that Howard would have done so too). Maybe the Thing is occult knowledge and what the PC's learn might set the stage for the next phase of the campaign.

Anyway, this is the sort of thing I think could work wonderfully well for games that aren't trying to do Ye Auld Game.

Part of an Idea for a d20 Mechanic

2011-11-20T16:03:00.001-05:00

I really, really like Greg Stafford's core mechanic for King Arthur Pendragon. It is both a universal d20 mechanic long before such became desirable and also a brilliant simplification of his own percentile system from Runequest. As logically intuitive as percentile is, it's also way too fiddly for me: I can't believe that I need a game system to differentitate between a 52% chance to do something and a 53% chance. KAP's system breaks it all down into 5% which is just right for me.

There is only one drawback to going from d100 to d20, which are the neat tricks you can play with criticals and fumbles in a percentile system. Again, the native BRP idea isn't for me; it's intensely displeasing to my aesthetic to have a mechanic where you want to roll either high or low. But there are other, niftier methods; my favourite is Unknown Armies' one of calling doubles that roll under as crits and doubles that roll over as fumbles (I have blogged about this before).

Obviously, you can't do this with a d20. I think KAP's native system is that you crit when you roll your score exactly (my games are all still packed away from the move, so I can't check). That is nice in one sense, since it maintains the blackjack mechanic of wanting to roll high, but, as a flat 5% loses any distinction between someone who is barely adequate scoring a crit and one who is highly-skilled. I was thinking of how to change the odds a bit and, to do so, found myself putting all skill ratings into one of five broad bands:

Poor = 1-5
Not Good = 6-10
Good = 11-15
Great = 16-20
Super-human = 21+

The ways to get a critical success would be:

Poor = no crits (you stink; just try not to die).
Not Good = crit when you roll your rank.
Good = same
Great = crit when you roll your rank-1or your rank.
Super-human = same (but recall that you add the amount by which your rank exceeds 20 to all rolls).

Now the crit thing is nothing earth-shaking in of itself. But coming up with the five types sort of seems clever to me as it addresses my number one problem with Runequest, KAP, and most other skill-based games: long stat blocks. At the sacrifice of some detail, you could actually drop the base stats and just use the average for each type, plus the actual median, like so:

Poor = 3
Not Good = 8
Average = 10 (or 11; both are slightly wrong so just pick one)
Good = 13
Great = 18
Super-human = 23

Notice two things here. First, the averages map quite nicely onto the stats for BRP or, indeed, Ye Auld Game. 3 is piss-poor and 18 is the best you can hope for as a human. Second, and less obviously, I think what I just did was translate the Moldvay/Cook unified modifier scheme from YAG to KAP.

When writing a stat-block, you could therefore assume that any ability is at Average and only mention the others. Getting you something like this:

Ogre (STR 18, CON 13, INT 3, Claws 13)

That's still more involved that YAG (who's simple stat-blocks remain an almost Platonic ideal), but it's a helluva lot better than you usually see.

Thoughts on MY Star Wars

2011-11-18T04:23:00.000-05:00

Like most of my fellows, I'm a Star Wars kid. I was 5 years old when the only movie which is actually called Star Wars came out and it was a life-changing event. Star Wars (not just the movie but the concept) was a definite First Love. But, as is often the case with First Love, things changed. We both grew older and began to get into different things. Star Wars (the franchise, not the movie (of which there is just the one)) began to get into Ewoks and wuxia and Luke and Lei being siblings and I was getting into The Dark Knight and Elric and not kissing siblings. Twenty-plus years later, we met again and - I'll admit - I was pretty excited at the prospect of getting back together. But she had changed. She was like some big video game with cool graphics and no soul. Ah well; I'm sure you know the story just as well as I.

And now, my son turns 5 and, unintentionally, I started showing Her to Him. And seeing it through his eyes rekindles things. I was reminded of a wonderful thought-experiment in which I took part on rpg.net last year: Using Ep. IV as the only Canon. I had some ideas which I still really like about characters and the setting, but here's the one I'm thinking of today:

No one can really say what they Force is, but we know how it manifests in Ep. IV: hypnosis (“these aren’t the droids you’re looking for”; arguably Kenobi making himself unnoticed as he sneaks around the Death Star), spatial awareness (“close your eyes, Luke”), and some kind of telepathic/empathic connection to the universe (“I feel a disturbance in the Force”). Notice that there ain’t no telekinesis here. Arguably, Vader’s Force Choke is TK, but, at the time, I thought that it was Vader telepathically controlling the guy’s autonomic nervous system - essentially hypnotizing the guy into not being able to breathe. If you buy that, then we have the Force as a very subtle, though still quite powerful thing.

This remains, to me, a much more interesting Force than that the one that evolved into guys flying around and knocking over platoons of soldiers with a wave. Jedi aren't super-heroes in my SW; they are mystical warriors. Perhaps more importantly, this strikes me as a kind of Force that is much more playable in a game with mostly non-Jedi (like in the one and only movie Star Wars). You can't pick up rocks and crush the big robot or absorb blaster-fire or make enemy ships smash into each other.

The Force in my SW is still a potent weapon, but it's one that requires thought and subtlety; once things goes past subtlety, it's time to draw light-sabres (e.g. Obi-Wan on the Death-Star). Of course, the Force still helps there, since the Jedi's ESP (isn't that a great, old-fashioned-sounding term now?) is a huge boon when fighting; he knows what his opponent is doing as he is doing it. The Jedi Knight feels his enemy's anger preparing to strike and his years of self-mastery allow him to control his own movements to an exceptional degree. Not super-human, mind you, but think of what a true martial arts master can do with his body and you'll know that you don't need super-powers to be awesome.

Obi-Wan Kenobi Needs No Telekinesis To Be Bad-Ass!

Those hypothetical readers who are old enough might recall that great issue of the Marvel Comics version of Star Wars, which told a story of Obi-Wan in his prime (but still old enough to be gray-haired, which is part of why it's awesome). Extra-canonical though it is, this issue is a good example of how I think a Jedi should be played: a cunning warrior with mysterious powers, but not a super-man.

Ironically, thinking in this direction led me to a nice rationale for the Droid troops we see in those movies I don't even want to name: many of the Jedi's tricks become useless against machine-foes. A Droid's thoughts can neither be read nor controlled. And thus a Battle-Droid becomes a much more credible threat to a Jedi, whose combat training is based, in part, on knowing his foe's mind; even more so since these Jedi can't just wave their hands and send the whole army flying away. Indeed, a War-Robot could be something of an Anti-Jedi Device, theoretically more dangerous to him than to the regular joes in his party. An equivalent to the various Wizard-Slayers in Ye Auld Game.

Finally, my vanity requires me to post a bit of fun from the old thread:

Yes, Emperor

PALPATINE: Vader, how is it possible that the most potent weapon in the galaxy was destroyed by a farm-boy with a defective astromech droid?

VADER: Well, Emperor, that is, of course, a most perspicacious question and, may I say, one that fully deserves to be answered in complete and unambiguous terms, with no qualifications, cover-ups, or tentativity.

PALPATINE: [Pause] Yes? And?

VADER: [Startled] Oh, you mean you wanted an answer now? Unfortunately, Emperor, as much as I should like to approach the entire issue with alacrity and celerity, you must understand that the Force is mysterious and not always...er, tractable. That is, I must align myself with the energy field that connects and binds us all together; there are also forms to fill out. I suggest we convene a Sith Committee to really get at the heart of the matter; study it from all angles and so on. Once we convoke that assemblage, I should think a few years of investigation and debate...

EMPEROR: A few years?! Vader, I want answers now! I have a Rebellion to crush.

VADER: Ah...but you don't want answers now.

EMPEROR: No...I don't want answers now.

VADER: You want to convene a committee to fully explore the matter.

EMPEROR: You know Vader, on second-thought, I think that I want to convene a committee to fully explore the matter.

VADER: On your way, Dark Lord of the Sith.

EMPEROR: Well, on your way Dark Lord of the Sith.

VADER: Of course, Emperor. Sound decision.

EMPEROR: [shaking his head slowly as Vader leaves the room] Curse your sorcerer's ways, Lord Vader!

VADER: Yes, Emperor.

On Attributes in Game Design

2011-11-11T20:58:00.001-05:00

Of late, my gaming thoughts (such as they are) have been turning to my old Sword & Sorcery game, Swords of Fortune. I started working on this game an Epoch or two ago; I'm not precisely sure when, but the last play-test draft I have up is dated October 21, 2008, which, if I can still do basic arithmetic, is like 30 years ago (that draft, incidentally, can still be found here). I was really hot on this game for some while and S&S remains one of my favourite things in the cosmos. I abandoned it because I felt that there were at least two better S&S games that came out between my beginning work and October 2008: Simon Washbourne's Barbarians of Lemuria and Tim Gray's Jaws of the Six Serpents. Both are excellent, excellent games that do a fantastic job at delivering the S&S experience.

And yet, here I am thinking about Swords of Fortune again. Tentatively, to be sure, yet I think I may still have something a bit distinct to add to the ludic pot. As time goes on, I find that my Misfortune mechanic remains interesting to me and stresses things that neither of the other games does by default. Also, I think my discussion of the literary genre has some value. So, I'm playing with taking up the old gauntlet again.

Yet, if some mechanics seem to retain value, others don't. And the one that just doesn't sit well with my anymore is Attributes. As it stood three years ago, every Hero had six Attributes: Sword, Shield, Tome, Tower, Crown and Cloak. The first of each alliterative pair is an active attribute (physical, mental, social), while the second is reactive. Thus, one would use the Sword attribute to attack people or lift heavy objects (active physical) and the Shield attribute to avoid getting hit or withstand the effects of drugged wine (reactive physical). I used to think that this set-up was the bees-knees - logical, symmetrical, full of kallos - but it no longer sits so well with me.

Which brings me to the actual subject of the post, that is, the nature of attributes in game design. One of the oppositions in attribute-design is between Standardized and Free-Form. The first is by far the most common and dates back to Ye Auld Game. I'm not sure when the latter debuted (although it might have been Robin Laws' Over the Edge from 1992). The strength of Standardized atts is that you can always compare character's relative abilities and know who is stronger, faster, or whatever. And, in theory anyway, you know what things are important to the game: if Social Status is an att, then presumably social status is important to this game. The strengths of Free-From atts are less easy to explain; they allow the player to create a character that more precisely meets their idea and avoid the abstraction that inevitably occurs with Standardized stats by letting you say exactly what you mean. Practically, they seem to encourage a lot of creativity in players.

The drawbacks are the inverse of the benefits. Standardized atts cannot measure anything that falls outside their parameters; in YAG, for example, you can measure strength and dexterity, but there is no way to measure your hatred for the Six-Fingered Man. Free-Form atts excel at that, but it can be impossible to compare relative abilities (how do you know how strong someone is if they don't have an attribute called "strength"?). Also, they can create a kind of paralyzation if the player doesn't have a strong idea of the character in mind from the get-go.

I think a less obvious distinction, but one of equal importance, is between what I will call Denotative and Connotative atts. Yeah, I just made those names up because I've never seen anyone address this idea. Denotative atts have a kind of one-to-one correspondence with the world: Strength measures active physical force which can be brought to bear, for example. Denotative atts are suggestive: one could find all kind of uses for an att called "Tough Old Merc". Another way to look at this is that Denotative atts are statically defined by what they measure (cause), while Connotative atts are defined by what they could do and that definition is an evolving one (effect). "Tough Old Merc" might measure professional experience, physical state, weapon's training, social status, and on and on; indeed, the nature of Connotative atts is that you keep finding new uses for them (it frequently becomes a game within the game).

Most games with Free-Form atts allow - in fact, encourage - Connotative atts. They suggest that "Strong as a Bull" is preferable to "Strong", but "Bull of a Man" is preferable to either. And most games with Standardized atts assume that they are Connotative; even if they allow for a relatively broad use for any att, they assume that there are some clear uses for the att and that's that. Charisma in YAG may be the poster-child for this latter case; no one has ever been sure what exactly it measures, but whatever it represents, it helps with reactions, hiring retainers, and morale.

This second distinction is thus usually lost within the first, but it need not be. Returning to old Swords of Fortune, you might see that the atts were clearly standardized, but they seemed to drift a bit between being Denotative and Connotative. And maybe that's were I'm finding them less satisfactory now than I did some years ago. Or maybe it's just that no one ever put any points into the Cloak att because I could never really say what it was good for. Either way, I feel that I might be able to add something meaningful in this area.

Does the Fiend Still Live?

2011-11-11T20:45:00.001-05:00

Good question. Looks like about four months since the last post (which wasn't much of a post in any sense beyond the technical). Hmn. So, life is still totally up in the air, I still don't have a gaming group, and my mind has been pathetically unfocused.

That's no good.

So, I'm taking the wolf by the ears (as the old Romans used to say), and deciding that I will begin posting something at least once a week for the rest of the year. It may be gaming thoughts, some fiction, or some absolute bloody junk, but it will be my junk, and maybe I can get my brain back into some vaguely functional state again.

Oh, and this post doesn't count. Cheers.

Soooo...slow year

2011-07-22T18:53:00.001-04:00

Yeah, actually I still live (as my beloved Warlord of Mars might say), but you couldn't tell by reading this blog, which hasn't been updated since April (?!). In June, we moved from our secret island base of Maui to Concord, Massachusetts, a little out from Boston. May was consumed by prep; June by moving; and July by...um...a whole lot of nothing. Not finding work; not getting my stuff in a timely manner; not finding a place to live; and definitely not having anything worth blogging about in the gaming milieu (as my beloved St. Gary might say). About the only thing that has happened is that wife was immediately bitten by a tick and contracted not just Lyme's disease but two additional tick-born diseases! Welcome back to the mainland, indeed.

I hope to reassemble some kind of life at some point and maybe even think about gaming again. I've had some incoherent thoughts about Antediluvian Sword & Sorcery gaming, occasioned by reading Joscelyn Godwin's inconsistent Atlantis and the Cycles of Time and Lin Carter's Lost Worlds. I make no secret that I am a fan of Mr. Carter's, even though he has written some awful stuff (Pirates of World's End I am definitely looking at you), in additional to committing all the sins for which S&S fans now castigate him (although I do not). In this case, the stories in this particular book set in Antillia and Atlantis were excellent and among his best (they also channelled Jack Vance to a great degree, which is no bad thing).

So, anyway, if anyone thought I had disappeared into the Seven Darks, fear not, gentle readers, I but lurk.

Head-Smack on Critical Hits!

2011-04-15T20:33:00.001-04:00

The loyal, hypothetical reader may recall my wrestling with Critical Hits and Special Maneuvers in Under the Dying Sun. In my last go, I decided that having an event occur on both a roll of box-cars and a roll of 15+ was all just too much and needed to pick one or the other. In the "end" (by which I guess that I mean the end of the post), I chose box-cars as both simpler and more psychologically satisfying. But I was sorry to give up the opportunity for better fighters to have an increased chance of special events. There it stayed for the last few months.

Until I was prowling around on rpg.net, looking at a thread about various ways of using 2d6 in FATE. Marius B suggested in this post that when rolling 2d6 against a positive target number (as opposed to the default FATE method), you had the opportunity to allow special events when rolling doubles that beat the TN.

Bingo!

That was the missing piece. I can keep the simplicity and psychological appeal of box-cars, while still opening up the opportunity for better combatants to increase their chance of a Critical Hit. Since the target number in S&S is a "11", the odds are that only double-sixes will be a hit. But, with a net modifier of +1, you could also get a crit from double-fives; a net modifier of +3 would add double-fours; and so on. You could add the matching piece about fumbles when you miss with doubles, but I have decided not to use that here as it would mean that 99% of folks have a better chance of fumbling than hitting; the lands under the Dying Sun may be harsh, but not that harsh.

As I mentioned in that thread, this is a real head-smack moment for me as I have long admired the way in which Tynes and Stolze's Unknown Armies implemented this idea in a percentile system over a decade ago and blogged about using it not too long ago (while forgetting to credit UA). Sigh.

Anyway, that makes the relevant section in UtDS as follows:

Combat Results

During each of the three Combat Phases (Melee, Missile, and Sorcery), everyone making an attack of that type makes a Combat Roll with varying results:

Roll is snake-eyes: Fumble

Roll is 10- : Miss

Roll is 11+ : Hit

Roll is box-cars or a Hit made with doubles: Critical Hit

Fumble

If the attacker is using a weapon made of natural, non-metallic materials, it breaks. The Referee should feel free to apply other results; for example, he may rule that Artifacts also break on a fumble or perhaps just run out of power.

Miss

Um...miss.

Hit

The degree of success indicates base damage done. This is modified by the weapon’s Damage Multiplier.

Critical Hit

A Critical Hit results in one of two effects: Automatic Hit or Special Maneuver.

Automatic Hit - if the attacker had no chance to roll 11+ due to modifiers (from Weapon vs. AC, opponent's Defense, etc.), he still hits on box-cars. This hit counts as a Combat Roll of "12" i.e. the degree of success is 2. This means that everyone has at least some chance of hitting any foe.

If the attacker has no need for an Automatic Hit, then he can choose a Special Maneuver:

Break Natural Armour/Shield - if the foe’s armour and/or shield if made of natural materials, it breaks and becomes useless. If both armour and shield are susceptible to this effect, the shield will always break first.

Extra Damage - the weapon’s Damage Multiplier increases by one. A Tiny Weapon goes from x ½ to x1, a Small Weapon goes from x1 to x2, and so on.

Wound - the opponent must roll on the Wounds Table (which usually happens only if reduced to 0 or less HP). This Wound is always temporary.

Knock Down/Back - the foe stumbles back a few feet or falls down. He needs to use a Half-Move to stand up or lose all Defense.

Disarm - the foe’s weapon goes flying out of his hand. He must use a Half-Move to draw another weapon.

Stunning Flurry - a flurry of disorienting blows that forces the foe to make an INT Throw or lose his next turn.

Deadly Display - the character's display of martial prowess is so intimidating that the foe must immediately make a Morale Throw. This is only useful against NPC's as player characters never make Morale Throws.

Do You Need an Illusionist Spell List?

2011-04-07T21:23:00.000-04:00

Every once in a while, someone at rpg.net will post to the long-defunct thread "101 Days of RC D&D". This was a pretty beloved thread - which is why it is frequently revived - and one that was responsible for more than one person's return to old-school gaming. I know that I had been making moves in that direction, but participating in that thread really catalyzed a lot of my thoughts on the subject.

Anyway, I was thinking about something I had posted to that conversation regarding elven magic. I was suggesting some ways to make elves - actually, I think that should be "Elves" - a bit distinct from human wizards - OK, "Magic-Users" - without really mussing with the rules too much. My two ideas boiled down to making Elves nature magicians and giving them Druid spells OR making them creatures of glamour and giving them Illusionist spells. Of those two, I was much more intrigued by the second, since the tree-hugger elf has long uninterested me, while scary-fairy-tale things still compel my attention.

I never got around to making that elven illusionist list of spells, but the idea has continued to interest me. I might have done so for my Onderland Campaign, except nobody has played an elf so it wasn't needed. But I was also held back by a nagging unhappiness with illusionist spells. And the problem was basically this: when you come down to it, aren't all illusion spells just different applications of the same spell? Unlike the MU spells, which involve all sorts of effects - from conjuring balls of flame to Jedi mind tricks to summoning demons - illusionist spells could be pretty much summarized as...well, creating illusions.

Some time later, I began to become intrigued by the second edition era Birthright setting. Birthright had all sorts of things wrong with it, in my opinion, but it did some things right, and one of those was evoking a medieval sense of Faerie. And the best book in the line on that topic was Blood Spawn, which was a totally inappropriate name, since it was about creatures of Faerie (called "the Shadow World" in Birthright) rather than creatures of the Blood (which was a whole...eh, let's not get into it). Anyway, Faerie is presented as place of constantly shifting appearance and every intelligent being in Faerie has an ability called "Seeming" which allows them to manipulate that reality. At low levels, this is essentially illusion, but at higher levels the line between appearance and reality is lost and one can effectively order around the world to one's desire.

This, to me, is exactly what faerie glamour is supposed to be. In my mind, the basic implementation in YAG would be that Elves in the mundane world have inherent powers of illusion - making straw seem to be gold, grass seem to be a feast, and goblins seem to be human babies. As they grow more powerful, these glamours attain more reality. And in faerie places, they are effectively total reorderings of reality.

But then I look at the various iterations of illusion spells and see that Audible Glamour is different from Phantasmal Force is different from Massmorph and so on. And I think that maybe this really doesn't model what I'm thinking. So here's an idea I have been playing with:

Faerie Glamour
Frequency
In the mundane world, an Elf may cast one glamour per day per level, although his ability is unlimited in frequency when in Faerie (if using the standard spell-casting system. I need to come up with alternate rules for Spellcraft & Swordplay and other games that use a casting roll).

Affect
At 1st level, the Elf can create an illusion that affects one sense. This need not be the same sense each time; he could make an illusory light at one point (a will-o-the-wisp) and then make wholesome milk smell curdled the next. The Elf can affect one additional sense for every three additional levels (4th, 7th, etc.)

At 13th level, the Elf can affect all five senses, at which point he is effectively reshaping reality.

Glamours do not disappear if touched or disbelieved. Someone who touches an illusory snake and feels nothing there is free to draw his own conclusions, but the snake does not go poof.

Duration
At 1st level, the Elf's glamour last for five minutes. The duration doubles at each additional level, so that they last for almost half-hour at 5th level (80 minutes). At 13th level, glamours are of indefinite duration and last until the Elf dies or the glamour is dispelled.

Damage
Although the Elf can seem to injure someone with his glamours at quite low levels, these seeming can not do any actual damage. Anyone subjected to an illusory attack makes the appropriate Save (depending on what system you are using). If the Save succeeds, the subject believes himself to have avoided the whatever it was; if the Save fails, the subject takes damage as normal depending upon the attack (a sword, a fireball, etc.), but all of this illusory damage is recovered as soon as the glamour is dissolved and the subject has a chance to recover.

However, as the Elf advances in power, his glamour achieve more and more reality. At 4th level, 20% of all damage done by a glamour (minimum of 1 point) acts like regular damage for purposes of recovery (however that works in your game of choice). This increases by an additional 20% for every three additional levels (meaning 100% at 16th level if any Elf should be so fortunate as to rise to that height).

Obviously, this needs more work. As much as I like the more laissez-faire treatment of spells in older D&D, illusions just seem to call for a bit more guidance. For example, there may be a need to describe area of effect (I don't think a 1st level Elf should be able to make an illusory mountain). I probably need some method of adjudicating the distraction effects of illusions. But still, the idea appeals to me more than the standard illusion spells. Has anyone ever done anything similar?

Ability Scores in OD&D: Use 'Em or Lose 'Em

2011-04-06T23:07:00.001-04:00

The central idea of character generation in D&D is picking up some six-siders and rolling some stats. This act is so central to most of our thinking that it sometimes comes as a surprise how meaningless abilities are, by and large, in the original iteration of that game. That abilities have become more and more mechanically important over later iterations only reinforces the notion that stats matter. But when you look at the LBB's, abilities do only two things: a high score in a prime can give an experience bonus and Charisma affects the maximum number of hirelings. And that's about it. No modifiers to melee or missile combat; no modifiers to armour class; no modifiers to Hit Points.

[The estimable Sham has rightly pointed out that I got a little carried away here. Abilties in the LBB's do more than that. For the record, here's what they do:

Low or High score in Prime Requisite modifies experienced gained (from +10% to -20%).
DEX 12+ gives +1 with missiles, while DEX 9- gives -1.
Very high (15+) or very low (6-) CON adds or subtracts 1 from each Hit Die.
Most interestingly: all CON scores in between those extremes affect what will later be called "survival shock", from 40% at CON 8 to 100% for CON 13+.
CHA establishes the maximum number of hirelings (from 1 to 12) and high or low score modify their loyalty base. I'd note here that these later modifiers are far and away the largest in the game - CHA 18 gives a whopping +4!
Finally, the text suggests some other uses but does not codify or explain them.

STR "will aid in opening traps" (?)
INT allows addtional languages to be spoken (but doesn't explain how many)
DEX "will indicate...speed with actions such as firing first, getting off a spell,. etc. (but, again, no mechanics. I assume that this is where Holmes got his initiative rule)
CHA (perhaps most famously and certainly most amusingly) "is usable to decide such things as whether or not a witch capturing a player will turn him into a swine or keep him enchanted as a lover....charisma will aid a character in attracting various monsters to his service."]

I have no idea if the original crew ever thought that was strange - why is it so important to roll CON if it doesn't do anything? I have to assume something like that went through the minds of Gary et.al. as Supplement I: Greyhawk quickly added to the mechanical meaning of abilities. And a scant few years later, the Player's Handbook increased the role of stats to an almost overburdensome level (I never used all the mechanics associated with abilities such as "system shock" or maximum spells per level). As James M. discussed recently, it is rather amazing to see how far things had come in the Dungeon Master's Guide, the last piece of the AD&D trifecta, with the discussion given to various dicing methods to produce superior abilities (or, as I like to call it, "cheating").

But let's go back to the original game for a minute. The increased importance is certainly one valid way of dealing with the largely irrelevant abilities, but it isn't the only way. I have often considered taking the alternate route: eliminate abilities altogether. "Heresy!", you say. "Is it even D&D then?", you ask. Well, maybe so and maybe not. The very intriguing Platemail presents a strong case that rolling abilities isn't a sine qua non of Ye Aulde Game. What have always been the really meaningful stats in D&D are Class and Level and it's perfectly reasonable to say that anything else is needless complication.

One objection to this line of thought is that all characters of like Class and Level will look too much alike i.e. have no meaningful differentiation. That's certainly the attitude that later iterations in general - and WD&D iterations in particular - have taken, as well as one I see expressed with some frequency among what, for lack of a better name, I have to call "new schoolers". But I don't buy it.

My experience is that no assemblage of abilities, skills, feats, talents, etc. serve to differentiate characters any better than simple, imaginative investment in the character (and often does so much less well). I'm saying "imaginative investment" rather than "role-playing" in part because it makes me sound smarter, but also because "role-playing" is too restrictive a term, implying as it does a kind of Method Actor regime. Imaginative investment can be that, but it doesn't need to be. You can invest some imagination in a character even if you always refer to him in the third-person. Imaginative investment often occurs during play in reaction to particularly notable (often absurd) events, such as when Bob the Fighter manages to miss every single shot with his bow and ends up being nicknamed "Hawkeye" and the butt of jokes for many an adventure.

I risk digressing too much here, so I'll hope I expressed my point clearly enough. Because it was made in order to suggest that eliminating abilities might well provide even more opportunity and incentive for imaginative assessment than would otherwise be the case. If I want to play the game, and don't just want to treat it as a war-game, moving chits around the board, there's an implicit encouragement to come up with something to distinguish "Level 1 Fighter" from every other "Level 1 Fighter".

Emphasis "might well provide" because I have never had the chance a game without abilities. But I'm eager to give it a try. And if any of my loyal, hypothetical readers have done so, I'd love to hear how it went.

From Hit Points to Luck Points?

2011-03-28T18:17:00.000-04:00

It's amazing how admitting that you have nothing to say let's you think of things unsaid. Perverse that.

I have been reviewing the rules of Under the Dying Sun as I may get a real live group to play soonish. And I came across this: "Hit Points are an abstract measure of vitality, ability to withstand pain, defensive skill, and luck." Nothing new or earth-shaking there, but that's actually kind of the point. Hit Points have always been abstract, but that is one of the most overlooked parts of Ye Auld Game's system. I mean, they are called hit point, for Gary's sake; obviously they represent how many hits you can take! Right? And that's why we have the crazy stuff about high-level guys shrugging off arrows, becoming immune to a knife in the throat, and easily surviving falls from high place. Ah, the arguments in Dragon magazine back in the day; how I miss ye.

As I mull this over in my head, I think that the name may be a large part of the problem. So what if you called them something else? What if you called them, for example, "Fortune" or "Luck Points"?

You get this:

Luck Points are an abstract measure of vitality, ability to withstand pain, defensive skill, and good old-fashioned luck. At the conclusion of combat, all characters who still have at least 1 Luck Point regain half of those lost in the bout (rounding down). Thus if a character takes a total of 5 points of damage, even if from different opponents, he regains 2 points once the fight ends and he can catch his breath.

Characters fall unconscious when they drop to 0 Luck Points or less and suffer from a Wound.

That's from the section on Injury & Death with the appropriate substitutions. And I rather like it. Instead of saying, "You are all out of hit points; you're dead", you could now say, with some brutal understatement, "Your luck has run out; you're dead."

On the other hand, that terminological shift might be a bit too much for some players. Hit Points are a fairly intrinsic piece of the game's history. God knows how much the shift to ascending Armour Class bothers some people. Hmn, something to think about.

Still Alive, Actually

2011-03-25T22:12:00.000-04:00

Not that you would know it from the blog. Between bouts of pneumonia, back injuries, vacations, and (least importantly for purposes of blogging), nothing of much relevance to say, I have obviously been absent. I can hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth. Hopefully, I might get this blog going again a bit, although I am unsure of its future. I began it for a very specific purpose - to act as a design log and forum for a game of swords & psionics - and although that game isn't done, the big pieces are long since decided. In addition, I must confess to having suffered a bit of blogger-burnout, both for my own and other's (far superior) efforts. Not due to a lack of good material; maybe the opposite of having so much good material that I can't really sort through it anymore.

But, maybe I'll think of something else to say.

Quite Distracted By: The House on the Borderlands

2011-02-02T04:27:00.000-05:00

Perspicacious, hypothetical readers will note that finial "s" on the last word of the title. But what does it mean? Mysterious, eh? Much like the work of the authour being referenced: William Hope Hodgson.

I came to W.H. Hodgson only comparatively recently. It might have been from seeing his name in conjunction with that of Arthur Machen, love of whom I have discussed before. Or, it might have been the excellent use of his ideas in the great World of Thool setting. In any case, I've only begun reading him in the last few years.

A few minutes ago, I completed The House on the Borderland. If you have read it, you probably know the strange space-time in which my head reels. But whatever cosmic vista lurches forward, I am a gamer. Which means that I am thinking, "how could I use this in a game"? And the answer that occurred to me was this:

What if you combined W.H. Hodgson's The House on the Borderland with E.G. Gygax's The Keep on the Borderlands?

Well, what I get anyway, is "The House on the Borderlands". Essentially, it's the Keep, but with the House taking the place of the fortress. And set in the 19th century.

The set-up follows the novel right up to where the Swine-Things cease their attack. In this version, instead of investigating the Pit and then going all 2001 about a century before 2001, the Recluse engages in the great Victorian lit tradition of sending word to London for his chums from the old College / Club / Army days. Enter the PC's.

As with the Keep, the House serves as the (sorta) secure home-base. From there, the intrepid adventurers descend into the Pit, into the tunnel opened up by the land-slide (or land-slip as W.H. has it), and thence into - what else - the Dungeon.

Some reasons why this is so great:

1. One of the hall-marks of Ye Auld Game is that the Dungeon, at its iconic best, makes no obvious sense. It is, as Philotomy has so well put it, the Mythic Underworld and operates according to its own, generally obscure rules (doors close on their own; monsters can always see in the dark except when they work with the PC's). Not only does it seem that the Pit in our story is a real Mythic Underworld, but the Fantastic in Hodgson never makes sense, by which I mean that it adamantly refuses mundane, logical explanation. That's bloody perfect for a Dungeon.

2. There is no clear resolution. One of the great problems in using stories as fodder for YAG is that stories usually have an recognizable, narrative structure, while story in old-school gaming is emergent from play. But the story of the House resolutely resists any acceptable, narrative structure. We never learn why the Swine-Things attack or what they really are or why the House has a trap-door to Hell in the cellar or why the Floating Hog-Face wants the Recluse to open the Door or anything. It's a story that should make your High School English teacher sob in frustration.

But that makes it great for gaming. There may be immediate problems and solutions to them, but there isn't actually any single mystery to solve or act to be performed. Adventures under the House could go for years; generations of explorers could come, level up, and go; and that would all be fine.

3. Swine-Things. Seriously, have orcs ever seemed this creepy? W.H. seems to have had a thing about pigs (see The Hog for another great example) and, just as his fan, H.P. Lovecraft could do with his fears, old W.H. could make his fear seem totally justified. I mean - man! - I have to think twice about eating bacon after reading this story (note: I ate it anyway).

There are lots of games that would work for this (I just realized the other day that there are a number of Victorian age adventure games in print now), but I immediately thought of Engines & Empires, of which I have written before. As I discussed then, I would forget the whole alternate-Earth deal (at least at first), and set it securely within cozy little Britain. So no demi-humans and also no steam-punk stuff. Just old India hands, cockney pugilists, Van Helsing-like scholars, and counter-cultural Black Magicians (what a world we gamers live in when those things can be discussed as "just such" and be seen as a limitation). Into the Pit they go and we all see what happens from there.

I mentioned Britain above. I know the novel is set in far western Ireland, bit that doesn't sit entirely right with me. It may just be my own lack of Hibernophilia, but I want to place the House on an old borderland; the west Ireland isn't any kind of borderland in the same sense. I'd prefer to use the border-countries with Scotland, Cornwall, or Wales; of those three, I favour the later. Maybe because of Machen? Maybe because it gives you a great excuse to bring old mines into the equation? I don't know and it doesn't really matter that much I suppose.

My mind is definitely turning on the Swine-Things. Obviously, they play the orcs in this scenario, but they need to keep their weird mystique to preserve the feel of the setting. I'm focusing on the hints W.H. keeps dropping about how the Recluse never finds any corpses in the morning and his occasional wonder if the things are even mortal at all. There's a lot of ways you could play that, but having brought up Van Helsing, my minds turns to vampires, specifically the Hammer Studious version of vampires. What if the Swine-Things are some kind of anti-life (they are described as having corpse-like flesh)? They can be seemingly killed as any other creature, but will also decompose in the sunlight, collapsing into dust within a matter of minutes. This is why no evidence can ever be found. However, should the body be kept out of the light , probably by being dragged back into the Pit - it will reform within 24 hours, good as new.

This actually doesn't have much impact on the PC's - not at first anyway. After all, who can tell one Swine-Thing from another? The disappearing bodies may be annoying if the characters are hoping for some kind of proof, but this isn't really that sort of game anyway. It only really maters if the PC's begin to wonder why they can't thin out the population. Or maybe if a particular Swine-Thing with some kind of distinguishing mark (a half-chewed off ear perhaps) seems to reappear every time it gets killed. That's the kind of thing that sends players into paroxysms of paranoia.

One last thought for the night: it might be useful to increase the population of the House in a long-term game. If the group is going to set-up camp here for a while, it may prove useful to have some opportunities for events to occur within the House. Perhaps the owners has the full complement of servants he should have. What if he had a family with his lost-love, perhaps a beautiful daughter who is initially aloof but ends up falling in love with one of the PC's (the first to reach a certain level?) just in time to get kidnapped? What if we the inhabitants of the House slowly go wacky, as is suggested in the novel? Is sister Mary deliberately trying to open the House to the Swine-Things before the Recluse stops her; and, if so, is she under the malevolent influence of the Floating Hog-Face? The potential parallels to the Cult of Evil Chaos from the Keep are right there if you want to use them.

I'm not going to get to play this game any time soon and it may just remain an idea. But, if so, it's out there if anyone wants to try it.

What's in a Name?

2011-01-19T18:05:00.000-05:00

So, yeah, last time I said that I was going to be posting about my super-hero project. What I had forgotten was that almost all the design work for that was already done. What I have to finish are writing out all the power descriptions and more detail on the setting of Industry City. Not really stuff I need too much feedback on.

But I did think of something I definitely do need input on: a name.

When I started this project, I was calling it The Never-Ending Battle. I thought that was a cute reference back to Truth & Justice since, as every comic-fan should know, Superman fights "a never-ending battle for truth and justice". Clever, eh? But, others have pointed out to me that the name is not only far from mellifluous, but also really doesn't explain what the game is about unless you already know what it is.

I then moved to the current working title, Heroes of Industry. That was supposed to work on two levels: at it's simplest, it refers to the geographical setting of the book (Industry City), while, on another, evoking the Studs Terkel-vibe I'm shooting for with that setting. I am, however, not at all convinced that it works on either of those levels.

I had a cheeky thought the other night around 2 am: Lies & Injustice. That's, again, a reference to T&J, but with the implication that something has gone horribly wrong. That's a crucial part of the 1970's setting atmosphere I'm trying to convey: the President of the United States is a crook; the CIA is making money from the drug-trade; the streets are filled with cast-off veterans from a war no one wants to acknowledge; regular folks have to stand in line to get gas for their cars - what the hell happened to all that Silver Age, atomic optimism?

I thought of Crime & Punishment, although there is a police procedural game of that title.

I also played with some classic "X&X" type names, such as Avengers & Archvillains, Crusaders & Criminals, and, my favourite for obscure reasons, Overmen & Outlaws. I'd worry that a name such as this would inaccurately suggest that this is some kind of D20 game, with Mutants & Masterminds being the obvious example (yeah, you've got Villains & Vigilantes, but that's also a damn old-school game, even if it isn't technically D20).

But I'm not sold on any of these ideas yet. So, I'm throwing it out to you, dear, hypothetical readers, to give me some feedback. You've read some suggestions; what do you think? Feel free to make up your own too, as long as you are cool with me actually using it (I'd give you a credit in the book as well as a stainless steel No-Prize).

The Pendulum Swings

2011-01-10T15:07:00.000-05:00

So, the latest round of Dying Sun play-testing is done and it was, as usual, very helpful. My last few posts reflect things learned in that game. They may, however, be the last posts about Dying Sun for a while. You see, my loyal, hypothetical readers, my internal, gaming pendulum has begun to swing once again to the supers-side.

I'm not really sure what prompts these swings. I last swung into the supers-mode at the end of March 2010 and swung out again in the beginning of September. About 5 months of supers, followed by about 4 months of Ye Auld Game (and Dying Sun in particular). Is it the change of weather? The trade-winds? I don't know. Fortunately, it's not what some folks call "Gamer ADD"; it's pretty consistently one or the other. I flirt with other genres, but fantasy and supers are consistently my two favorites. Entirely coincidentally, my table-top group's Labyrinth Lord campaign is drawing to a close and and it looks as if we will be playing DC Adventures next (not my preference for system, but I'm trying to be a team-player here and give it a try).

So, I'll predict 4-5 months of supers-thinking before I get back to Dying Sun. I know that my posts about supers-gaming are tremendously less popular than ones related to YAG and I'm debating whether to post about it or not. But, I think I shall: it seems that blogging is a useful exercise in and of itself, whether or not anyone reads or responds.

Anyway, consider this fair-warning. In case anyone is interested, I've been doing a thread over at rpgnet attempting a very specific comparison between two popular light-systems: The Fiendish Comparing of ICONS and BASH UE. Anyone considering those games might find something useful there. So, until next time: Excelsior!

Critical Hits & Special Manuevers : Too Much

2010-12-28T15:54:00.000-05:00

I think something else became clearer in the play-test fight I reported as Blood on the Sand. This is that Critical Hits and Special Maneuvers kind of overlap too much. Several times in that fight, I had to stop and think too much about what to do when I got a roll that was both box-cars and 15+. And that turns out to be a pretty common occurence. So I think I need to combine those two things. But which "trigger" to use: box-cars or a Combat Roll of 15+?

I've been debating this for a while now, but I've settled on box-cars being the trigger for a Critical Hit? Why? Well, getting a high roll already has an advantage built-in by the One-Roll mechanic. Plus, I guess I'm just too brainwashed by my past, but I feel like rolling a natural "12" just ought to mean something special. So, here's the new version:

Combat Results

During each of the three Combat Phases (Melee, Missile, and Sorcery), everyone making an attack of that type makes a Combat Roll with varying results:

Roll is snake-eyes: Fumble
Roll is 10- : Miss
Roll is 11+ : Hit
Roll is box-cars: Critical Hit

Fumble

Miss

Um...miss.

Hit

The degree of success indicates base damage done. This is modified by the weapon’s Damage Multiplier.

Critical Hit

A roll of box-cars results in one of two effects: Automatic Hit or Special Maneuver.

Automatic Hit - if the attacker had no chance to roll 11+ due to modifiers (from Weapon vs. AC, opponent's Defense, etc.) , he still hits on box-cars. This hit counts as a Combat Roll as 12 i.e. the degree of success is 2. This means that everyone has at least some chance of hitting any foe.

If the attacker has no need for an automatic hit, then he can choose a Special Maneuver:

Break Natural Armour/Shield - if the foe’s armour and/or shield if made of natural materials, it breaks and becomes useless. If both armour and shield are susceptible to this effect, the shield will always break first.

Extra Damage - the weapon’s Damage Multiplier increases by one. A Tiny Weapon goes from x ½ to x1, a Small Weapon goes from x1 to x2, and so on.

Wound - the opponent must roll on the Wounds Table (which usually happens only if reduced to 0 or less HP). This Wound is always temporary.

Knock Down/Back - the foe stumbles back a few feet or falls down. He needs to use a Half-Move to stand up or lose all Defense.

Disarm - the foe’s weapon goes flying out of his hand. He must use a Half-Move to draw another weapon.

Stunning Flurry - a flurry of disorienting blows that forces the foe to make an INT Throw or lose his next turn.

Deadly Display - the character's display of martial prowess is so intimidating that the foe must immediately make a Morale Throw. This is only useful against NPC's as player characters never make Morale Throws.

The Referee should feel free to add any other Special Maneuvers that seem fun.

Blood on the Sand II: The Finale

2010-12-21T20:44:00.003-05:00

Here's the finale to the fight I posted about previously. As before, first the mechanics and then the narration.

Mechanics

Melee - Admago attacks Wild Man 4. Rolls 8+2+10. Near miss. WM 4 attacks in return and gets 6+2+8. Nope.

Because he is so wounded, Keendo's decides he will Dodge and head toward Aban Dar (the fallen sorcerer).

Deal attacks WM 3. His first roll is 3+5=8 and misses. But his second (he's fighting with two daggers) is box-cars, for a total of 12+5=17. He pushes his multiplier from x1 to x2 and does 14 points of damage; the bugger is dead (several times over), but the pit-fighter looks cool). WM 3 strikes at Deal and gets snake-eyes! His spear is broken, which would suck for him, except that he is dead and so it's not the worst thing that has happened to him lately.

Missile - none.

Magic - none.

Movement - Admago circles around to see Aban Dar bleeding and Keendo rushing his way.

Deal heads toward Admago and WM 4.

Aban Dar lies still and bleeds.

WM 4 decides to make a run for it, giving Admago a free attack at his back. Admago rolls a lousy 4, though and misses.

WM 6 is gone.

Narration

The Desert Man and his foe circle each other - sword feinting against spear, spear clashing with sword - but neither finds an opening.

Further on, Keendo takes the opportunity to slip away from the melee and run toward the bleeding Sorcerer, hoping to avoid any further injury. Dea-laidir watches him go, while warding off his foe's spear with his twin blades. As the Wild Man makes a powerful thrust, the pit-fighter jumps aside and hears, with satisfaction, the sound of the spear splintering against the hard ground. At nearly the same split second, he strikes with both blades: the shaggy barbarian manages to dodge one, but, in so doing, places himself right in the path of the second bone dagger and Dea-laidir claims his second throat of the day.

Rather than savouring his victory, though, the sicarius is immediately off towards the embattled Admago. But even as he does so, that Wild Man, seeing the hopelessness of his situation, begins to run off the path, into the underbrush, in a desperate attempt to save his own life. The Desert Man attempts to strike at the suddenly exposed back, but misses.

All is silent.

What I Learned

All in all, I feel pretty good about the fairly substantial changes I have made to the combat system. It actually shocks me that I have added complexity to the basic, abstract system of Ye Auld Game; I almost feel like I should turn in my Rules-Lite Gamer card. But, I dunno, this is all working for me. There were a couple of intriguing dice results in this combat: a PC got box-cars while an NPC got snake-eyes in not one but two rounds. The result in the round was inconsequential but made the PC look awesome (14 points of damage in one blow!); the sorcerer's box-cars in the previous round was nifty and had a cool double-kill effect.

But there are some kinks that need working out:

First, I should make clear that in table-top play, you can announce your intentions per phase, rather than all at the beginning of the round. The Ref should say, "Anyone doing Melee?" and resolve that; then "Anyone shooting missiles?" and so on. That way, if you had intended to charge someone, but they die in the Melee Phase, you don't have to charge their corpse. You could certainly say that this simulates fog of war and whatnot, but I don't find it much fun. I definitely don't want scripted combat, which is the result otherwise.

Second, I totally made up that parting shot for Admago on the spot, based on a rule in the S&S Combat section that I had heretofore ignored (it is kinda buried a bit in the book). It occurred to me that melee could become a game of leap-frog otherwise: move in on Round 1, attack and then half-move back to your friends. I don't like where that heads. So here's the expanded idea for movement in melee, taking cues from the B/X iteration of YAG:

Any character who attacks or is attacked during the Melee Phase is engaged. An engaged character cannot move in those rounds in which he is engaged with 3 exceptions:

1. His opponent dies during the Melee Phase, effectively disengaging the character. The character can make a half-move the same round.

2. He dodges during the Melee Phase, which also effectively disengages him (a "Fighting Withdrawal"). Half-move possible in the same round. This also disengages the opponent, who is thus free to make a half-move following the character and re-engage him next round.

3. He forgoes any attack or dodge, doing nothing and thereby disengaging (a "Full Retreat"). The character is free to make a full move at the same phase, BUT his opponent gets a "parting shot": a free, extra attack at the character's retreating backside. The character in full retreat cannot apply a Shield or a Parry to his Defense against this parting shot (although his natural, level-based Defense still applies).

Blood on the Sand

2010-12-13T15:27:00.000-05:00

Same shtick as usual: light posting, but heavy behind the scenes work. However, I thought it might be interesting if I posted a little snippet of a combat that occurred during the current play-test as it really shows off how combat in Under the Dying Sun works as opposed to more baseline Ye Auld Game.

The fight is between 4 PC's and 6 Wild Men, those hairy little barbarians that lurk throughout the Tharian Hills. The PC's, all first level, are Admago (Desert Man Slayer), Dea-laidir of the Pit (True Man Slayer), Aban Dar (True Man Sorcerer), and Keendo (Mutant Survivor). What follows is just one round; first, the mechanics, followed by a bit of narration (I always liked when gamebooks woudl do that thing on facing pages).

The Mechanics

Melee - Wild Men (WM hereafter) 4-6 were charging Admago and Aban Dar. Somehow, I forgot that these three guys were in between Admago and the further group. D'oh! Even with the Desert Man's speed, I don't see him running around three charging foes who were only 20 feet away. So, I say that Admago intended to move up, but meets WM 4 halfway (10') and clashes. Each gets a charge attack.

Adamago rolls 9+2=11. He does 1x3 with his bronze sword (3 because he charged) points of damage, not quite killing the Wild Man. His foe gets in his attack at the same time: WM 4 rolls 6+2=8 and misses.

Meanwhile, the WM 5 and 6 charge Aban Dar, who meets them with his wonderful iron dagger. The sorcerer rolls boxcars for a Critical Hit! No point in breaking the Wild Man's armour, so Aban Dar chooses to bump his damage multiplier from x1 to x2. His roll was 12+1=13, so he does 3x2 damage and obliterates WM 5.

But WM 5 gets his attack in. He rolls 11+2=13. Uh-oh. That's 3X3=9 damage. More than the sorcerer has, so he must roll on the Wounds Table. He gets 3:5, which means that his Left Shoulder is wounded; lose 1 STR. He then rolls to see if it's permanent and gets a 4; yep, that shoulder is permanently screwed. Which kind of sucks, but only if he doesn't die right now anyway

WM 6 rolls and gets snake-eyes for a Fumble! He misses and his spear breaks.

Meanwhile, Deal rushes back toward WM 2 and 3, who are rushing Keendo. He goes for the wounded WM 2 [No. 2 was hit by Admago's spear previously]. Deal rolls 6+5=11. Because he is charging he does 1x2=2 damage with his dagger and WM 2 is dead.

Before he dies, he strikes out at his target of Keendo. He rolls 3+1+4 and misses. His partner, OTOH, rolls 10+1=11, doing 1x3=3 points of damage to the mutant (who now has 1 left).

Keendo gets in his licks and rolls 7+2=9. Nada.

Missile - None.

Magic - None.

Movement - Admago and Deal charged so no movement this round. Keendo can do a half-move if he wants to try and get away from the WM. Aban Dar is on the ground bleeding from a massive shoulder wound and needs immediate attention.

All WM charged and so don't get to move this round either.

Summary - Aban Dar is ground zero, next to WM 5 whom he killed. WM 6 is with him, holding a broken spear.

10' on, Admago and a very wounded WM 4 stand.

35' feet from AD, Keendo and Deal, with WM 3. WM 2 is dead on the ground.

WM 6 decided to run from the party in the direction his whole group had originally been taking. He'll gone unless someone wants to chase him.

WM 4 attacks Admago.

WM 3 doesn't want to stand around between Deal and Keendo; he decides to try and run past the otherwise engaged Admago and get away like WM 6.

The Narration

The tense seconds of combat , which had seemed an eternity, suddenly explode into blood and death! Admago tries to reach Keendo, but is intercepted by one of the charging Wild Men. The Slayer dodges a spear-thrust and delivers a stout backhand to his foe's chest. The Wild Man isn't dead, but he looks ready to drop.

Behind him, the other two spear-men race forward and find Aban Dar alone. Alone, but not helpless. He dodges one attack and sees his foe's spear shatter on the ground. The sorcerer then whirls his flashing steel dagger and cleanly puts it directly into the marauder's right eye! Yet even as he does, his opponent's spear pierces through the muscles of Aban Dar's left shoulder; pierces and rips through. Blood flashes about both foemen as they sink down together, the third man standing mutely with the broken haft of his spear dangling from his hands.

Meanwhile, two other Wild Men charge Keendo, even as Dea-laidir of the Pit charges them. The Slayer catches one off-guard, parries a spear-thrust, and plants his dagger in his foe's throat. But even as that one falls, the other stabs Keendo in his side with a wicked thrust. The mutant feels burning fire and knows that he can't last much longer.

What will happen? Will the party triumph? And, if so, at what cost? Stay tuned...

Rethinking Damage Multipliers

2010-11-30T20:08:00.000-05:00

As promised - more combat mechanics for Dying Sun. As long-time readers will doubtless recall, Dr. Samsara thought he was damn clever in figuring out how to handle differently-sized weapons in his One-Roll Combat system. I had initially thought to have a simple addition or subtraction to the base damage for Large or Small weapons respectively. In the comments, the estimable Mark Krawec reminded me of Over the Edge, where weapons had a type of damage multiplier instead. I really liked that and came up with a simple table:

Tiny Weapons multiply base damage by 1/2
Small Weapons multiply base damage by 1 (i.e. no change)
Medium Weapons multiply base damage by 2
Large Weapons multiply base damage by 3
Huge Weapons multiply base damage by 4

I was really pleased with the simplicity of that. I carried over from the earlier (separate damage roll) version that Large weapons imposed a -1 to the Combat Roll from unwieldiness. And done was done.

Except when it isn't. I'm finding Large weapons to be a bit frustrating in practice. Let's do one of my famous long and drawn out analyses. The analysis involves one guy with a Medium weapon (let's say a sword) and one with a Large (let's say a battle-axe)

Both guys get a Combat Roll of 11. The sword-guy does base damage of 1 x 2=2 points of damage. It's was a weak hit. The axe-man in this case misses, because his roll is penalized by 1. OK, fair enough so far, I guess.

Now they each roll a 12. Mr. Sword does base 2 x 2 = 4 points of damage. Capt. Axe is modified down to an 11 and so does base 1 x 3 = 3 points of damage.

When they roll a 13, things finally even out. The swordsman does base 3 x 2 = 6. The axe-dude modified down to 12, does base 2 x 3 = 6.

From this point on, the axe-guy is doing more damage. On a 14, the sword does 8, while the axe does 9. On 15, the sword does 10 and the axe does 12, and on a 16, the sword does 12 and the axe does 15.

The key here is that it is very difficult to roll a 15 on 2D6. You have to have some substantial modifiers, which would basically come from pretty high levels. During low- and mid-levels, you would be lucky to get a 12. Which, when add in the penalty for not being able to use a shield, makes using a Large weapon pretty much a losing bet at those levels. The central question:

Is that a problem?

The answer: I'm not sure. It feels somewhat problematic. Maybe just because I've been staring at it for too long. But the germ of this actually came up in a sideways manner when a player asked if he could do Large-weapon damage using a Medium-weapon in both hands. I was stumped.

If "yes", then why ever bother to have a Large weapon, if a Medium one gives you the flexibility? Furthermore, my rationale for levying the penalty to the Combat Roll (unwieldiness) seems weird if using a nice, balanced, not awkward medium-sized weapon in two hands. But eliminating that penalty would only exacerbate the uselessness of the Large weapon.

If I say "no" instead (which is what I did in this case to keep the game moving), that feels strange. The guy tossing aside his battered shield and gripping his sword in both hands to cleave his foe from stem to stern is a part of the genre.

What to do (if something actually needs doing)?

I have thought about falling back to some version my original idea: Large weapons give a bonus to damage. I had proposed a +2, which, when you factor in the -1 to damage from the penalty to the Combat Roll, is effectively a +1 to damage. I'm thinking now that maybe that should be upped to +3, for an effective +2. Why? Well, that balanced better with the loss of 2 to Defense from not having a shield and means that I could say you get an effective +1 if you use a Medium-weapon in both hands (i.e. if using a two-handed weapon, it makes more sense to use a weapon designed for it, but there is still a benefit to be had).

That's okay. But I still don't like where that takes me with Small weapons. Since they don't affect the Combat Roll, to make things symmetrical I would have to give them a -2. I guess that fairly captures the d4 damage range they have in most versions of YAG, but it shifts the odds way off-kilter so that they basically always do 1 point of damage (i.e. you have to get a roll above 13 to do more than 1). I really don't like the sound of that. I could stick with halving on Small and addition on Large, but - dammit - that's so inelegant.

Then I started thinking more (as aside, this usually happens when I wake up at 3.00 am and can't sleep). I could steer away from the damage aspects altogether and find another way of differentiating weapons of different sizes. Reach, for example. Maybe Large weapons all strike first, followed by Medium, and then Small. That doesn't suck, but I really, really like the simultaneous nature of melee in the game as written so far (and totally stolen from the estimable Calithena, with acknowledgment).

I started coming up with some rules about relative lengths interacting. That Large weapons get an advantage against Small weapons until the Small weapon guy gets in close, in which case the penalty flips and now the Small weapon gets an advantage. That's attractive in that I have often wanted to have a system show the advantage of using a dagger in close quarters, but it really goes against the abstract nature of YAG's combat; for RuneQuest, it's fine.

And that's where I am. Maybe I should forget this entire line of thought?

An Idea for One-Roll Combat for Percentile Systems

2010-11-30T17:18:00.000-05:00

I mentioned previously that I have recently gotten ahold of the new Runequest II and have been quite favourably impressed. The most notable "wow factor" is probably the Combat Maneuvers; I was impressed enough to be inspired to do something along those lines for Under the Dying Sun. I reread the book again over the holiday weekend (note for non-Yanks: we celebrated our Thanksgiving holiday last Thursday, making it a four-day weekend for most) and found subtleties to the system that I hadn't see before.

But that never stops me from changing things up. It's what I do. The idea that popped into my head was to do a One-Roll Combat System, along the lines of the one I came up with for Dying Sun. I call it one-roll in that "to hit" and "damage" are both factored into the same roll; there are frequently several rolls required in RQ so this term isn't completely accurate. But good enough. Oh yes, I do know that there is the thing called the One-Roll Engine. It doesn't work for me. It just doesn't, so don't suggest that I check that out.

Before I present the idea, I think a bit of background maybe in order. RQ's percentile system is a type of black-jack system, where you want to roll under your skill number, but still roll higher than the other guy. It's only implemented sometimes, but it's what the core of the system is (or should be). Thus, in an opposed contest of whatever sort, if both actors make their roll, whoever rolled the higher wins. This means that having a higher skill value not only gives you a better chance of success (one is more likely to roll on or under 70% than 35%), but also a better chance to make the higher roll (a roll of 60 is a success for the guy with 70%; the guy with 35% can't beat that roll at all except in the slight chance of a critical hit).

Unfortunately for me, RQ has never implemented that core idea as elegantly as I would like. This particularly irks me in the cases of critical successes, which are achieved not by rolling high, but by rolling low (10% or less or your base chance). Is that a bad mechanic? No. But it's so aesthetically unpleasing and we all know how important that is to me. So, in addition to making a one-roll, I also want to drop that "roll high except when you want to roll low" business.

That all said, here's the basic idea:

The tens-die tells you how much base damage you have done.

Our first guy from above has "Sword & Shield" at 70% and roll a 27; his base damage is 2. Had it been 57, his base damage would be 5.

What I like about this idea is that it plays on the blackjack system: you want to roll under your skill, but as high as you can under that. It also continues the hidden benefits of having a high skill as the more skilled guy can get better base damage than someone less skilled; if you only have a 35% in "Sword & Shield", you can never get more than 3 base damage.

In this system, each weapon would have some sort of damage modifier that works off of the base damage. I don't know exactly how I would set-up the modifier: whether it is a multiple (as Dying Sun is for now (hint, hint)) or just a straight plus/minus. Whatever it is, is doesn't involve rolling dice (since that would defeat the point of the whole exercise).

With this idea, the quality of the roll effects the quality of the success. And frankly, you could leave it at that, but RQ has always had the idea of critical successes. I have two thoughts on this, one simpler and one that does plays better with the RQII system. The first idea is a simple critical hit/miss system:

A success that is a doubles, doubles the damage. A failure that is doubles is a fumble.

So, back to our two foe men. The guy with 35%, can get a critical success on rolls of 11, 22, and 33, with the resultant base damages of 2, 4, and 6 respectively. His opponent with the 70% skill, gets a critical on rolls of 11, 22, 33, 44, 55, and 66. On that later roll, he would do base damage of 12, which is pretty hot. But if he had rolled 77, 88, or 99, he would have fumbled (and RQ has always had fun with fumbling).

I have to be honest, I find calculating 10% of a skill on the fly somewhat difficult. Yes, that may be pathetic, but it is what it is. So this idea makes me happier. Plus, what we get again is that the higher the skill, the better the chance of getting a critical success, the better the quality of the critical successes, and the less chance of getting a fumble. That later one pleases me as I have also never cared for RQ's fumble calculations either which is roll low, but not too low, but not too high either".

What we don't get here is a clear blackjack mechanic. Does that matter? I don't know; I kinda like this doubles thing. But we also don't have Combat Maneuvers here, so one might change the idea so as to say that rolling doubles makes critical success and drop the doubling of damage thing as that is folded into the Maneuvers system.

Maybe once we finish this DC Adventures game, I'll try out RQII with these rules.

Stuff Still Happening

2010-11-29T21:10:00.000-05:00

Despite my quietness here, stuff still happens. Like a phoenix from its ashes, my real-world gaming group has been resurrected. It was small before (3 guys) and losing one seemed fatal, but we have added three new fellas and look to be getting back on track. We're playing through what I guess you might call an "adventure path" for Labyrinth Lord in a setting heavily-influenced by Vance's Lyonesse books. We're reaching the end of that now and might be playing DC Adventures next. While I can't claim to be thrilled with that choice, I feel it's fair enough to let somebody else choose the game and give it try.

I've also been running another Dying Sun play-test and again finding out that there are a bunch of stupid things still in the there. For instance, my missile weapon ranges are buggered to hell and back. More importantly, I'm finding that my rules for Large weapons may not work as well as I wanted. Which means - that's right - expect more posts about Combat Mechanics in the near-future.

Finally, there is a potentially very exciting thing (well, exciting to me) going on that I can't talk about. So why bring it up? Because it's eating up a lot of my mental resources right now. I should be ignoring it and getting back to work on UtDS, but I keep thinking of stuff for this other thing that I can't talk about. Ah well.

More Geekery: My Booklets

2010-11-19T21:33:00.000-05:00

Fresh off the presses:

Many thanks to my unwitting office equipment.

The Urban Dungeon

2010-11-12T21:47:00.000-05:00

I don't recall where I first heard this idea; probably Grognardia, but when a guy posts as prolifically as James, it is all but impossible to search around the archive and find soemthing. Anyway, the idea was to have an abandoned city as a dungeon. What that means, specifically, is that movement would restricted in the same way that it is in a subterranean dungeon; the characters can't just climb over buildings. Not sure I am explaining it all that well, but it's late on a Friday afternoon.

The point is that I was just idly looking at the old TSR Lankhmar: City of Adventure from 1985 (I think). It had this booklet with some ridiculous AD&D write-ups for the daring duo, some maps of the various districts of the City of Black Togas, and then a bunch of city geomorphs to be placed in the city as needed. And it occurs to me that this would work really well for the urban dungeon. The district maps are probably a bit too much, but the geomorphs are at a much larger scale and are already on gridlines.

One of the appeals of the urban dungeon to me, is that there is an underlying rationale for all these rooms. I'm afraid I have a lot of trouble with fun-house dungeons or even the regular old dungeons with a bunch of rooms randomly placed in a building. Who builds like that? I get how it works in Castle Greyhawk (insane mega-wizard does it for fun), but it gets old after awhile. A city has some reasoning behind it, but not too much. There was no real urban planning, but buildings do have to fit together in a city, unlike in a dungeon.

Maybe it's just me, but this has a weird appeal. It might work really well to give you a Red Nails kinda location.

Groomsmen: Beloved of Death

2010-11-09T19:20:00.000-05:00

Groomsmen (Red Monks)
No. Appearing: 3D
Size: Medium
Armour Class/Defense: 1 / 1
Move: 30’
Hit Dice: 1+2 (8)
Attacks: 1+1 (Large Sword)
Modes: 11+ chance for sorcery
Disciplines: 11+ chance for sorcery
Special: Class Abilities: 1st level Slayer
Morale: Never check
Treasure: Type 1
XP: 1

Groomsmen are seemingly-normal human beings; they are also homicidal maniacs. They belong to the dreaded Cult of the Red Bride, a sect devoted to the spread of death. They symbolically marry themselves to death, who they represent as a beautiful woman covered in blood and gore, with a two-handed sword in her grasp.

Whether these men are driven insane during their secret ordination rituals or were crazy to begin with is a topic of some idle conversation in the markets of the world. Certainly something is done to them upon ordination for the eyes of a Groomsman are inhuman: deep black windows into the void. Should, a PC gaze into the eyes of Red Monk, they must make a WIS Throw or fight at a -2 due to unease and fear; NPC’s must make Morale Rolls and suffer -2 unless they score an Extremely Positive result.

The Groomsmen, who are more often called "the Red Monks" by outsiders, wander the world in small bands and attempt to kill anything they meet. Although these “human locusts” present no real threat to walled cities, they are frightening terrors to the smaller habitations under the Dying Sun. Many villages have been utterly destroyed by larger bands of Groomsmen. They themselves know no fear, nor anything other than the need to present deaths to their beloved Bride; they never check Morale and will fight even in obviously suicidal circumstances. Red Monks wear light armour underneath scarlet robes, with cowls over their faces, belted at the waist with linked human vertebrae. They wield two-handed swords of iron and have few other possessions.

Most Groomsmen are 1st level Slayers, specialized in the greatsword (which counter-acts the usual -1 penalty from Large weapons). For ever 5 Groomsmen encountered, there will be an additional “Elder Brother”, a Red Monk who has somehow survived to make it to 2nd level. Elder Brothers have an additional Hit Die (12 Hit Points), a further +1 to Combat Roll, and Mass Slaughter giving them 2 attacks versus 1 Hit Die foes. Whether or not there are any Red Monks who have survived to higher levels is unknown.

Artifact: Somatic Restoriation Matrix

2010-11-05T18:56:00.000-04:00

Somatic Restoration Matrix (Super-Heroic -8 to Decipher)

A bizarre assemblage copper and glass tubing filled with vari-coloured liquids all surrounding a hollow crystal larger than a man. The Matrix is able to restore (or more accurately, “recreate”) a living organism to full health and with it’s natural complement of appendages whether the subject is alive or dead. To do this, the subject must be placed into the crystal, which fills with various solutions that break down the subject into his component parts for analysis. This is fairly unpleasant if the subject is still alive, although he won’t be for long. After that, the Matrix will “grow” a new version of the subject in the prime of health and with all the memories of the original. This restoration process takes some six weeks to complete.

The legendary God-King of Karch was reputed to have such an Artifact, which was the secret to his seeming-immortality. It is said that a treacherous wife (one of the infamous 1,001 Brides) broke the Matrix after the God-King had allowed himself to be dissolved, but before he had regrown to more than a lump of protoplasm. What happened to the protoplasm is unknown.

Places under the Dying Sun: The Sea of Bones

2010-11-04T22:42:00.001-04:00

The Sea of Bones (10 XP)
Beyond the Tharian Hills, far to the west of mighty Hajal, lies the much-storied Sea of Bones. Uncounted years ago, before the birth of the grandfathers of the eldest, the mighty Grand Dukes of the East, whose wealth and power exceeded the dreams of the grandest dreamer, met the heretofore unstoppable Kerchak Horde, whose fury and lust for destruction exceeded the nightmares of the most timid, upon a grassy plain whose original name has been lost to time. The Horde of the Supreme Khan was so vast that the thunder of their hooves could be heard in the Hegemony of Ashok,beyond the Valley of Mariners, and the people marveled at the ceaseless thunder without a storm. The united armies of the Grand Dukes were so large that the feet of the marching men carved a great rift in the earth, which is still visible in the Aeon of the Dying Sun. And when the two sides finally met in clash of arms, the force of their violence was such that the entire earth could feel the ground shake so that all feared the end of this world had come at last.

Some say that the vast hosts fought together for a year and a day without end, with some going so far as to say that the Sun took fright and refused to leave the Underworld so that no man could truly say how long the battle lasted without means of reckoning the passage of time; others, such as the anonymous scribe of the Faresian Chronicles, assert that the destructive power of each side was so tremendous that the great battle took but the span of a man’s breath. Whatever the case, all agree that every man there was killed and no living thing remained on the plains of forgotten name. That once-grassy plain was turned, in a year or an instant, into a vast sea of death, shadowed for miles around by the flight of carrion-beasts, which blotted out even the fiery Noon-time sun.

Yet the sloth and avarice of Men knows no bounds and soon human ravens descended upon that place to loot the bodies of the fallen. And there was much to be scavenged, for the armies of the Grand Dukes were arrayed with such finery as none now living have ever seen and the Kerchak Horde had spent the previous decade plundering the uncounted wealth of the Far Lands. But no matter what treasure was prised from the dead hands of the fallen soldiers, no scavenger was ever satisfied for each hoped to find the bodies of the Grand Dukes of the East, to whom mere wealth was the slightest possession. It is said that one of the Grand Dukes rode a magnificent steed made all of gold to the final battle; another wielded a mace whose head was a perfect diamond of a size exceeding a man’s face and of a colour which no longer exists; a third Grand Duke is rumoured to have brought a personal bodyguard carved out of green jade who could not be slain by ordinary means; while a fourth wore an impenetrable suit of mail made of stars that had been forged in the heart of the sun. Many stories there were and are of the surpassing splendour of the Grand Dukes of the East and many longed to find and loot their corpses with a passion that overwhelmed all other considerations. Yet there are no tales of even one of the Grand Dukes ever being found.

Today, the Sea of Bones is vast wasteland, so filled with the ancient remains of the great battle that the earth beneath is entirely obscured. For all practical purposes, the ground of the Sea is bone, human and animal. Virtually every other substance has either rotted away over the centuries or been looted, yet the faint odour of decay somehow remains. There is no vegetation and, since the carrion disappeared, no natural animal life either. The only exception are the Scavenger Clans.

Travel upon or through the Sea of Bones is thus an unpleasant, eerie experience. Animals that are not familiar with the area become very tense and can act in unpredictable ways; some people behave likewise. Although there are areas at the periphery where the bone has become ground down, from the passage of feet, into a fine powder, in most places traversing the Sea of Bones means picking a way through a thick layer of remains, some of which are heaped together in piles exceeding a man's height. Travel times are multiplied three-fold in this place and dangerous, even fatal, falls are not uncommon.

And yet there are some few merchants, crazy or desperate, who travel to the Sea of Bones, to trade with the Scavenger Clans. The Scavengers are an unpleasant lot, largely composed of the descendants of those who came centuries ago to loot, supplemented by the occasional desperate misfit with nowhere else to go. Mutant and barbarian, the Scavengers are ignorant, malnourished, greedy, territorial, suspicious, unpredictable, and extremely in-bred. Congenital diseases of various unpleasant sorts of common. Most know of no other life beyond the Sea, being the off-spring of those consumed by lust for the treasures of the dead and learning such lust themselves to the exclusion of all else. Without any natural resources, however, the Scavengers would all die, but for those merchants who are willing to venture into this place, bringing food, water, and other goods in exchange for the ancient loot still torn up by the residents. The Scavengers have very little sense of the value of their items, since they have no frame of reference anymore; they regard everything as “treasure”. Some few merchants have made their fortunes and retired as a result of a single, fortuitous exchange in the Sea of Bone; many others have met their deaths due to some unprovoked outburst of violence.

But there are worse fates than simply dying. A number of travelers and traders have reported uncanny, manlike forms moving through the bones at night, with only the gleam of their red eyes to see them. Unearthly keening noises have also been noted. And bones have been noticed which are both fresh and gnawed upon, although there is no animal life. Some have suggested than at least some of the Scavenger Clans have turned to cannibalism and degenerate ghouls are the result. They say that the more human Scavengers trade only to lure fresh meat into the Sea of Bones.

All animals not bred in the Bone Lands become extremely skittish there. Any attempt to make animals perform even the most routine actions requires a Reaction Roll. Any action which would normally require such a roll, suffers a -2 penalty. Similarly, most NPC's need to make Morale Roll upon entering the Sea of Bones and every day thereafter, rolling at a -2 when confronted by violence.

The Sea of Bones can serve as the reputed resting place of any fabulous artifact the GM needs. The Grand Dukes possessed anything and everything desirable, according to the legend, so if it’s something that a PC or NPC might want, it might be there somewhere (or again, it might not). It can also serve as a destination for trade, if the PC’s find themselves desperate for cash and fall into the job of guarding a merchant train. The tensions inherent in the bottom-feeding traders ultimately seeking the same things as the crazed, starving Scavengers can easily lead to violence.

2010-11-02T22:55:00.000-04:00

Back in September, I posted about my dissatisfaction at the asymmetry of the my Psychic Combat Modes. In play-testing the other day, a thought hit me: most of the physical combat rules assume that you are using deadly force, but all of the psychic combat rules are based on that assumption. The one really big difference is that there is an option for non-deadly physical fighting i.e. grappling. So, perhaps a psychic grappling might serve as the solution to my aesthetic dilemma? Instead of doing direct Ability-damage, like the other Attack Modes, a successful psychic grapple would freeze you into inaction.

What I particularly like about that option is that as normal grappling is STR-based, I can make psychic grappling CHA-based and fill that one missing slot. Kallos, baby! The grappled guy has to make a CHA Throw to escape, just as the wrestled guy has to make a STR Throw.

Of course, there are still some details to work out. In physical grappling, the attacker has the option of squeezing the victim on subsequent rounds to do damage or to throw the victim. Should mental grappling have the same options? Although it sounds dangerously asymmetrical, my instinct is to say "no", but I'm not quite sure why.

Another thought is the applicability of the mental grapple. This touches on a subject that has been bothering me for some while: should there be some kind of Attack Mode that works against the non-psychics? YAG provided for that possibility (through some ridiculously complicated rules). I decided against it fairly early on and was working from the idea that having psychic sorcery was, potentially, as much burden as benefit, because it opened you up to the possibility of psychic combat. And I still like that idea.

But, something else that came out of play-testing brought this up again. You will doubtless recall my struggles over Scorpion Man benefits and drawbacks. One of the ways that I have addressed that is that I have removed psychic potential from the Akrab. They are now the only playable species that can't have sorcery. That was a suggestion from Drew and make so much sense I kind of had to wonder why the hell I hadn't thought of it. The alien bug-men have different brains that the humans? Shocker. But, going back to the past paragraph, that isn't as much of a drawback as it might seem because it makes them invulnerable to psychic combat.

So, I'm considering making psychic grappling the one Mode that can affect anybody. That then brings up another consideration. The Psionics of YAG had it that every psionic would get the Empty Mind Mode. So should Mental Grapple be the automatic first Attack Mode that all sorcerer's get? Or do you just take your chances?

Hmn.

The Mind-Saber: An Elegant Weapon For a More Civilized Age

2010-10-28T22:28:00.000-04:00

Inspired by this wonderful thread on rpg.net of re-imagining Star Wars if the original movie was the only canon - i.e. exactly what you did from 1977 to 1980 - I present this little Artifact from under the Dying Sun.

Mind-saber

The Mind-saber appears as a tube of metal covered with electrode touch-points. This Artifact only works in the hands of one possessing psychic powers; it is simply a hunk of metal to anyone else. If a psychic holds the device with a bare hand, he may focus his sorcery into the tube, which creates a shimmering energy-field resembling a sword-blade. Various tubes produce blades of various colours and lengths and no one has any idea why.

The Mind-saber is amazingly responsive to the psychic’s thoughts, allowing even a physically-frail individual the potential to be a combat force. The wielder of the Mind-saber may use his CHA to modify his Combat Roll, rather than his STR. Furthermore, the ‘saber can be moved with such ease that it also provides a Defense equal to the user‘s INT Modifier. The “blade” slices through objects with unnerving ease and is extremely harmful. It has a Damage Multiplier of x3 and the following modifiers vs. Armour Class:

AC 0: +4
AC 1: +3
AC 2: +2
AC 3: +1

Should the wielder lose contact with the Mind-saber, it will shut off. No one has ever been able to figure out why a psychic cannot project his mind-force across space into the weapon, but it only functions when in physical contact with flesh. In addition, because the weapon feeds off of the user’s psychic power, anyone wielding a Mind-saber suffers a penalty of -2 to all sorcery rolls, including using Disciplines and Psychic Combat.

Special Maneuvers: Give A Guy A Chance

2010-10-27T20:08:00.000-04:00

In thinking further about Special Maneuvers, it occurs to me that they a probably too powerful. I think perhaps the victim should get a Saving Throw. So it would work like this:

Special Maneuver

If the Combat Roll is 15+, the attacker has the option to make a Special Maneuver. If so, he subtracts 5 from the Combat Roll so that he does less damage (so a roll of 17 reduced to 12 has a base damage of 2 now). He can reduce the Combat Roll to 10, in which case he does no damage other than the results of the Special Maneuver. These Maneuvers include:

Wound - the opponent must make a CON Throw or roll on the Wounds Table (which usually happens only if reduced to 0 or less HP).

Knock Down/Back - the foe must make a DEX Throw or stumble back a few feet or falls down.

Disarm - the foe must make a DEX Throw or his weapon goes flying out of his hand.

Stunning Flurry - a flurry of disorienting blows that forces the foe to make an INT Throw or lose his next turn.

Deadly Display - the character's display of martial prowess is so intimidating that the foe must immediately make a Morale Throw.

The Referee should feel free to add any other Special Maneuvers that seem fun.

Dodging and Defense

2010-10-26T21:15:00.000-04:00

I've been wrestling with the idea of Defense for a long time now. The concept comes from Spellcraft & Swordplay, which, in turn, takes it from OD&D. The base idea is that magical armour and shields don't affect Armour Class, but rather levy a penalty to incoming attacks. That mechanic disappeared as the idea of Weapons vs. Armour modifiers were dropped; at that point, Armour Class became simply a defense number, so it was easier to have armour and shields just change the AC. Since S&S keeps the Weapon vs. Armour table, it makes sense to keep the original mechanic.

But, S&S doesn't give the mechanic a name and I have expanded upon the concept in Dying Sun. First, I think shields are criminally undervalued in Ye Auld Game. I won't rehearse the argument; suffice it to say that there is a reason that most people don't enter hand-to-hand combat without something to hide behind. So in Dying Sun, shields gives a Defense of +2. A fighting-man can use an off-hand weapon to parry instead, gaining a +1 to Defense, but only against melee weapons (you can't parry arrows except in super-hero games).

Something was still bothering me, though. And then, I got involved in a discussion at rpg.net about the game Atlantis: the Second Age. And that reminded me that I really liked the idea from Talislanta (the base system) in which a character's weapon skill not only adds to their combat roll, but subtracts from an opponent's roll. And that caused me to figure out what was bothering me: Defense was too unconnected to character. It reminded me that I had added a house-rule to the very AD&D-based system in the Arcanum (the predecessor to A2A) in which weapon bonus functioned similarly. So, anyway, that all prompted this rewrite:

Defense
Defense is a penalty levied against incoming attacks. Defense equals the Attack Bonus from Class and Level. Thus, a 4th level Slayer with 2+2 Attacks has a Defense of +2. Monster Size can also grant a Defense.

Shields grant a +2 Defense versus all incoming attacks and may add to DEX Throws for area-effects attacks and the like. As with other armour, most shields are made from natural materials and break when they take a hit from a roll of boxcars (see Critical Hit). If a character is wearing natural armour as well as using a natural shield, assume the shield breaks first.

Bronze shields work as normal. A steel shield adds an additional point of Defense, making +3 in total.

A combatant may use a small, parrying weapon in the off-hand instead of a shield. This grants only a +1 to Defense versus incoming melee attacks and none versus missile attacks. It does, however, give the character 1 extra attack with the off-hand weapon at -1 to the Combat Roll.

In turn, that prompted me to think Survivors. I felt that while Slayers ought to be the best at actively defending, Survivors ought to be good at just getting the hell out of the way. And so I write down the following this morning:

Dodging
In addition to the usual ways in which in a character is protected during a fight, he may also choose a full-bore defense by dodging. The character declares his intent to dodge during the Declaration Phase of the round. Dodging means that the character gets no attacks - Melee, Missile, or Sorcery - as dodging essentially replaces those actions. He does get a half-move exactly as if he had attacked. Note that the dodging character must have at least ½ of his Movement Rate to dodge; otherwise he is too encumbered to move fast enough.

Any time the dodging character is attacked during the round, he is allowed to make a DEX Throw to avoid the attack. If successful, the dodger avoids the attack entirely; if unsuccessful, the attack proceeds as normal.

The Referee should feel free to add modifiers to the dodge throw. A more balanced system, would allow the attacker’s degree of success to function as a penalty to the dodging DEX Throw. So, if the attacker rolls “13”, the dodge roll takes a -2 penalty. This ruling is more fair to the attacker, but adds complexity. Alternately, one might use the attacker’s combat bonus as a penalty instead. So dodging an attack from a 5th level Slayer is always at -2. The Referee might also apply a penalty to consecutive dodges with each dodge after the first adding a cumulative -1 penalty; this would reflect the idea that a combatant can only really evade so much in the 5 seconds of a combat round.

As always, thoughts welcomed.

More with Adding to Combat

2010-10-26T20:53:00.000-04:00

I'm actually really surprised that no one thought my idea of adding Special Maneuvers to combat might be too complex. Gratified, but surprised. I'm hoping to give them the road-test soon.

So, you only have yourselves to blame for my continuing to think along these lines. First, I decided to codify some of my thoughts into one place. For example, in what follows, I had discussed breaking weapons and armour before, but I had that rule in the section on Weapon/Armour Materials. I realized that it made much more sense to put those rules together with the rules for Special maneuvers.

Combat Results
During each of the three Combat Phases (Melee, Missile, and Sorcery), everyone making an attack of that type makes a Combat Roll with varying results:
Roll is snake-eyes: Fumble
Roll is 10- : Miss
Roll is 11+ : Hit
Roll is 15+ : Special Maneuver
Roll is box-cars: Critical Hit
Fumble
If the attacker is using a weapon made of natural, non-metallic materials, it breaks. The Referee should feel free to apply other results; for example, he may rule that Artifacts also break on a fumble or perhaps just run out of power.

Hit
As discussed previously, the degree of success indicates base damage done. This is modified by the weapon’s Damage Multiplier and sometimes other modifiers as well (such as STR).

Special Maneuver
If the Combat Roll is 15+, the attacker has the option to make a Special Maneuver. If so, he subtracts 5 from the Combat Roll so that he does less damage (reducing a roll of 17 to 12 means that base damage goes down to 2). He can reduce the Combat Roll to 10, in which case he does no damage other than the results of the Special Maneuver. These Maneuvers include:
Wound - the opponent rolls on the Wounds Table (which usually happens only if reduced to 0 or less HP).

Knock Down/Back - the foe must stumble back a few feet or falls down.

Disarm - the foe’s weapon goes flying out of his hand.

Stunning Flurry - a flurry of disorienting blows that forces the foe to lose his next turn.

Deadly Display - the character's display of martial prowess is so intimidating that the foe must immediately make a Morale Throw.
The Referee should feel free to add any other Special Maneuvers that seem fun.

Critical Hit
A roll of box-cars has one of the following effects:
Automatic Hit - if the attacker had no chance to roll 11+, he still hits on box-cars. This means that everyone has at least some chance of hitting any foe.
If the attacker has no need for an automatic hit, then another effect results.
Break Natural Armour/Shield - if the foe’s armour and/or shield if made of natural materials, it breaks and becomes useless. If both armour and shield are susceptible to this effect, the shield will always break first.

Extra Damage - the weapon’s Damage Multiplier increases by one. A Tiny Weapon goes from x ½ to x1, a Small Weapon goes from x1 to x2, and so on.

More to come.

Know Your Audience

2010-10-21T02:59:00.000-04:00

Alright, I'm a dunce: I just now noticed that there is a button that let's you see your audience on Blogger. I got 7 views from Russia this week! There was a period back in my Pleistocene Epoch (i.e. university) when I studied Russian. It started as just a way to avoid taking Spanish or French, but I ended up really liking it. My father's family emigrated from Russia in the early part of the previous century so I had a kind of genetic curiosity about it. If I hadn't been so eager to graduate, I might have pursued it further. As it is, my knowledge of the language has sadly deteriorated over the intervening years and ya gavoritz pa-russky ochen ploha chasty.

Anyway, zdrastvitye tovarishy!

Special Combat Manuevers?

2010-10-20T17:21:00.001-04:00

I finally got ahold of a copy of Mongoose's Runequest II. After a first go through, I'm fairly impressed. It's still more fiddly than I like - I still think that SIZ is one stat too many, the Parry rules have too many qualifiers, hit locations, etc. - but really it's pretty slick. The thing that really grabbed my attention was the idea of Combat Maneuvers. It's the first time that I have seen the idea implemented in this way: rather than choose a Maneuver before you roll and face a penalty, you roll and if you achieve great success, you earn a Maneuver.

That's clever. It removes a huge waste of time at the front end when the player usually has to decide if he wants to do a special move. So that has me wondering about using something like that in my gaming. That's always a suspect thought - "I just saw something cool in some other game; I'll add it into mine!" That doesn't mean that it is a bad idea, just suspect. But let's set that aside for the moment and see how it might work.

In my One-Roll Combat, you succeed on a roll of 11+ with each point in the one's place being the base damage (so 11 gives 1 point, while 14 gives 4 points). Unlike most iterations of Ye Auld Game, this means that the Combat Roll has "success levels" or "margins of success". And that's what RQII's system is based on. But my roll also takes damage into account which RQII doesn't. Thus, here's a first thought:

On a roll of 15+, a character may reduce his Combat Roll by 5 to take a Special Maneuver instead.

If the roll was 15, that takes it down to 10, which means no hit point damage is inflicted (a zero in the one's place), but you get the Special Maneuver instead. If the roll was a 17, it would go down to 12, meaning you do 2 points of damage plus the Special Maneuver.

RQII has a list of Maneuvers that go on a bit too long for me. I'd do something like this:

Wound - the opponent rolls on the Wounds Table (which usually happens only if reduced to 0 or less HP).
Knock Down/Back - the foe must stumble back a few feet or fall down.
Disarm - um...disarm.
Stunning Flurry - a flurry of disorienting blows that forces the foe to lose his next turn.
Deadly Display - the character's display of martial prowess is so intimidating that the foe must immediately make a Morale Throw.

So, does that seem like something that would add flavour to Dying Sun or just add complexity? I'm not sure right now.

October Playtest Report

2010-10-19T22:49:00.001-04:00

Optimism isn't my strong-suit. I seldom find the silver-lining of the lemons that life gives me (or however that goes). Still, one can try.

It appears that my Sunday Labyrinth Lord game has fallen apart. It was a new game with only three of us, but I was quite enjoying it. The Referee was running us in a setting that was heavily inspired by Vance's Lyonesse, which was nifty. It was my first go at actually playing LL; a little trickier than I expected, but only because we could never be sure whether we were remembering the actual rules or the B/X rules, which prompted more book shuffling than desired. But still, fully enjoyable. Gaming with three is always a perilous prospect; you are balancing on the knife-edge of being too light. Alas, our third, a younger fellow to whom we were introducing the delights of old-schooling, suffered some unpleasantness in personal life and appears to have decamped my little postage-stamp of an island.

Undefeated, the now campaign-less Referee and I got together anyway and ran some test combats for Under the Dying Sun. I had really wanted to do this for a while now because I hadn't been able to kick the tires of the One-Roll Combat System. I was rather concerned that it might prove too hard to hit and hurt things this way. Fortunately, that did not prove to be the case in our test runs. Hits were coming pretty often actually, with my sword-slinging Slayer doing 6 points of damage on most hits. Combat was brutal and to the point.

Only in retrospect did I think to do some statistical analysis on this. If that sort of thing bores you, feel free to skip the rest of this post.

In B/X, a 1st level Fighter has a 50% chance of landing a hit on an unarmoured opponent (assuming no bonuses from STR and so on). In Dying Sun, weapon choice makes a difference so the comparison is a bit tricky, but let's try. A 1st level Slayer has the following chances:

72% with a sword (the best weapon against an unarmoured foe)
58% with an axe
42% with a mace or spear
17% with a club
8% with a fist.

I'm a little worried about that last one, but otherwise it works for me.

That B/X Fighter has 40% chance to hit a leather-armoured foe. A 1st level Slayer has

42% with a sword
28% with an axe or spear
17% with a mace
8% with a club
A lousy 3% with a fist (that is, only a roll of boxcars)

OK, now I officially think I need to jigger with the unarmed modifiers. Otherwise, I'm still fine.

Our increasingly-beset B/X Fighter has a 30% chance to hit a foe in mail. Our Slayer has

17% with a spear
8% with an axe or mace
3% with a sword or anything else.

Finally, a 1st level B/X Fighter has a 20% chance to hit a plate-clad foe. The Slayer has a flat 3% with anything.

Now, let's do this all over. But this time, our two warriors will have advanced to 7th level. The 7th level Fighter has a 75% chance to hit an unarmoured foe. The 7th level Slayer has the following:

92% with a sword
83% with an axe
72% with a mace or spear
42% with a club
28% with a fist.

BUT, the Slayer also gets 2 attacks every round to the Fighter's 1. Unfortunately, I don't have the maths to figure out how that changes the odds. If anyone does, I'd be grateful.

Now, the Fighter has a 65% against the leather-clad foe. The Slayer (with his 2 attacks) has:

72% with a sword
58% with an axe or spear
42% with a mace
28% with a club
8% with a fist

The Fighter 55% against mail. The Slayer has:

42% with a spear
28% with an axe or mace
17% with a sword
8% with a club
3% with a fist

Finally, the 7th level Fighter has 45% against plate armour. The Slayer has:

17% with a sword
8% with a club
3% for anything else.

Results: armour - particularly heavy armour - is way more useful in Dying Sun as written than in B/X and those calculations assumed that the foe did not use a shield. Of course, armour is also way more expensive in Dying Sun. Plate costs a measly 60 gp in B/X and is easily affordable to the 1st level Fighter, whereas a suit of Heavy armour made out of lacquered wood or Scorpion Man chitin costs 5 times that amount (300 coins) under the Dying Sun and represents a huge amount of wealth; steel plate costs 3,000 coins and represents thre income of a small city. Only the richest can afford heavy armour. Even measly light armour, which costs 20 gp in B/X costs 50 coin in Dying Sun. And, on top of that, it is very hard to wear armour for protracted lengths of time under the Dying Sun.

Conclusions: I'm not yet sure. I think I want to up the weapon modifier for fists against the lighter armour classes. Otherwise, I think I'm pretty happy with it.

Pakistani Flood Relief & Gaming

2010-10-19T18:07:00.000-04:00

Just in case you missed the news, RPGNOW is again doing a brilliant job at collecting money to help victims of disaster; in this case, those suffering from the flood in Pakistan. It's brilliant because for a mere $25, you get almost $1,000 worth of gaming downloads. There is some cruft to be sure, but you get some really big ticket items such as Steve Kenson's rules-lite super-hero game ICONS, the repacking of the old-school classic Dragon Warriors, HarnMaster 3rd edition, the gigantic FATE-based Star Blazer Adventures, Greg Stolze's Wild Talents 2nd edition, some module called The Cursed Chateau by some hack named Maliszewski :), and - why not - Exalted 2nd edition. And much more.

Check it out and feel good for once for buying more games than you need. :)

Tales of Arthur Machen and the Supernatural

2010-10-12T21:52:00.000-04:00

One of the big trends over the last few years in the Old-School Renaissance is the turn towards Weird Fantasy. Carcossa, Athanor, Planet Algol, and the late, lamented, World of Thool just to name a few. That last one, Thool, was uniquely interesting in that it's creator passed on some of the most famous sources of inspiration (paging Mr. Lovecraft!) and drank from a less well-known literary well. Thool's drawing from William Hope Hodgson was particularly well-done: the existentially-creepy Weed Men from The Boats of the Glen Carrig.

In that spirit, I'd like to turn my attention to Arthur Machen. Machen was a fascinating writer: a devoted Catholic and a Grail Quester, a Monarchist and a passionate lover of his native Wales, a Victorian born some 50 years too late who repeatedly wrote about horrid sexual practices, and a craftsman of ornate prose who was unexcelled (in my opinion) at evoking nameless dread from seemingly-ordinary reality.

I first became acquainted with Machen at second-hand back in a previous existence as a professional scholar of medieval heresy, magic, and witchcraft. There, I found his name repeatedly linked to the bete noir of witchcraft historians, Margaret Murray. Unless you sturdy such things, you may never have heard of Ms. Murray, but you have almost certainly encountered her central thesis: that the phenomenon labelled "witchcraft" in the medieval and early modern periods was a dimly-glimpsed survival of a pre-Christian, Northern European religion, which survived in an organized form as a sort of medieval conspiracy or counter-Church. Once upon a time, this idea was so accepted that Murray was allowed to authour the Encyclopedia Brittanica entry on "Witchcraft". More lastingly, she was one of the founding mothers of the modern Wicca movement.

Murray's idea incorporated the notion, both attractive and repellent, that the past haunts the present. Machen worked with that idea as well, but rather than pretend to scholarship, he used it to inform his fiction. In The Novel of the White Powder he presents something like Murray's Witch-Cult, but the the result is something so dreadful that it is never quite described. This is a favourite technique of Machen's wherein suggestive phrasing not only adds to the horror (that is, the reader is left trying to wonder what could be so horrible), but alludes to the insoluble mystery of existence (the real world, lying just under our imagined ordinary one, is ineffable).

In stories such as The Novel of the Back Seal and The Shining Pyramid, Machen worked out an idea that had some popularity among the folklorists: British stories of "the Little People" are cloudy memories of short-statured, pre-Celtic inhabitants of the Isles. And in Machen's stories, these ethnological dead-ends are terrifying. Even if you have never read those stories, you might know the idea from Robert Howard's loving tribute, The Worms of the Earth (Howard was a happily acknowledged fan of Machen's work).

Machen's most famous horror story is probably The Great God Pan (his most famous story period is undoubtedly The Bowmen, a tale of a war-time miracle that was so convincing to his contemporaries that it supposedly came true). It's one of his earliest and most Decadent (in the technical sense) and displays his core ideas: a mystical reality invisibly underlying our own own, contact with which lets out the evil within Man. Perhaps his best story, though, is The White People, which may not be horror per se, but which is an amazingly creepy journey into the mystical world through the mind of a little girl. If you have ever wanted to make Faeries the scary, alien things that the ancients thought of (as opposed to Tinkerbells), you must read The White People.

Although both Machen and Lovecraft were writers of Weird Horror and both ably used similar techniques of suggestive allusion, they were also quite different. At the risk of reductionist psychologizing, it is worth noting that Machen was a High Church Anglican, who vehemently disapproved of the stolid, Puritanism to which Lovecraft was heir. In any case, Lovecraft's vision is cosmic and his terror comes from the realization of man's essential, pitiful smallness within the vast cosmos. Conversely, Machen's vision is decidedly terrestrial and terror proceeds from the realization of the horribleness that resides within Man. It is humanistic, but in a strangely distorted way. Although the actualization of Man's inner evil might provoke a physical transformation (the stunting of the aboriginals or the indescribable bodily alteration in The White Powder and The Great God Pan), these things are still human - are still us - in a way that no Old One ever could be (you might argue that HPL was doing something the sort in The Shadow Over Innsmouth, but I think that would be wrong).

If you haven't read any of Machen, then shame on you. It's not too easy finding copies of his works as he has not been republished in the manner of Lovecraft, or given the limited, but royal treatment afforded to Hodgson. Still, Machen is worth the effort. Even though the revelations contained therein may...change you.

Balanced, Random Character Generation

2010-10-12T20:44:00.001-04:00

This is pretty much a random idea that popped into my head for no very good reason. So why not blog about it? :) The idea is to preserve random generation of Abilities, but which would be balanced in the sense that all characters have the same total number of points.

Start with the B/X scheme of Ability Modifiers (my favourite scheme of Ability Modifiers based on 3d6). This should be hard-wired into your brain, but just in case it isn't:

Average roll for 3d6 is 10.5, while the range of average (i.e. no modifier) Ability scores is 9 to 12. We have to decide what we would want the Ability scores of the PC's to average out to. Let's pick 11 (pretty damn average). If evenly applied to all 6 Abilities, that would be a total of 6x11=66 points. If we wanted a more heroic game, we would pick a higher number, but let's just try this for now.

We roll 3d6 for all Abilities in order and deduct the points from the total as we go. So I get:

STR: 11 (leaving 66-11=55 points)
INT: 9 (55-9=46 points)
WIS: 14 (46-14=32 points)
DEX: 14 (32-14=18 points)
CON: 5 (18-5=13 points, so...)
CHA: 13

That's a nicely-mixed character, with slightly above-average (+1) WIS, DEX, and CHA and moderately below-average (-2) CON. He's definitely not a Fighting-Man; probably a Thief.

Now that randomly-rolled example turned out easy because I didn't run out of points. Let's fake it now and push the system with an improbable bunch of high rolls:

STR: 15 (66-15=51)
INT: 15 (51-15=36)
WIS: 15 (36-15=21)
DEX: 15 (21-15=6)
CON: 15 (6-15= -11. Oops)

Alright, I don't have enough points left to pay for that CON. So here's what happens now: we circle around and subtract the required number of points from STR. We need 11 points to make up the difference and our strong-man suddenly goes down to STR 4. Who said this was going to be fair? It's still random generation.

But that leaves us with 0 points and we still have to roll CHA. OK, so let's roll and - mirabile dictu - we get another 15. Who'd a'thunk? Now we circle back to the second stat, INT, but we can't take all 15 points because you have a minimum of 3. So we take 12 points from INT (leaving us now weak and dumb) and then move on to WIS, where we take the final 3 points outstanding. That gives us a final of:

STR: 4
INT: 3
WIS: 12
DEX: 15
CON: 15
CHA: 15

That's one hell of a weird character which is a good thing in my opinion. But, if it seems too harsh, you might stipulate that no more than X number of points can come off of any one Ability (maybe 5?). If you did that, you would end up with this instead:

STR: 9
INT:10
WIS: 14
DEX: 10
CON: 10
CHA: 15

He's certainly not the ubermensch he would have been with the usual method, but he's a more interesting character for that.

One alternative that I considered was using total modifiers rather than total Ability Score. I quickly decided against that, even though it would be much quicker, since it would mean that all characters will be much more samey.

Is this system worth using? I have no idea. Like I said, random thought.

Specialties: First Very Rough Draft

2010-10-11T22:46:00.000-04:00

This is the kind of thing I am thinking about:

Three Base Classes Plus A Specialty

2010-10-11T21:50:00.001-04:00

The debate over the number of Classes in Ye Auld Game goes back at least as far as Supplement I: Greyhawk, which saw the introduction of two new Classes: the ever-lovin’ Thief and the ever-righteous Paladin. For all I know, however, there may have been debate before that; one of those ludo-archaeologists like James M ought to try and check on that. I have to assume that there were people in 1975 who looked at Greyhawk and said, “Five Classes? Geez, I can’t take this rules-bloat!”.

Okay, maybe not. But still, the debate, while it has waxed and waned over the years has never gone away. At it’s simplest, the question is, “How many Classes do you need?” But, probing a bit into the consequences of the answer, we see that the real question is, “What does a Class really represent?”

We see that evolving debate play out over the first three supplements to the Little Brown Books. I already mentioned the introduction of the Thief and Paladin in 1975’s Greyhawk; that same year brought us Supplement II: Blackmoor with two more Classes: the Monk and the Assassin. Finally, 1976’s Eldritch Wizardry saw the last official Class for original D&D, the Druid. In two more years, we would get the Player’s Handbook for Advanced D&D, which would give us the Ranger, the Illusionist, and surely the weirdest-arsed class ever produced, the 1st edition Bard. It just goes on from there, and that’s not counting the innumerable unofficial Classes that appeared in the pages of the Dragon, such the Ninja and the Bounty Hunter.

Obviously, the tendency was to accumulate more Classes as time went by. Although I’m sure the real reason for this was to bring new, shiny, and cool stuff into the game, the (probably unintentional) consequence was to define the idea of Class much more narrowly than before. Classes began to more and more overlap with the idea of “Profession” and sometimes even “Background” (aka the Barbarian). So even though the Fighter, the Cavalier, and Barbarian are all basically guys who fight, they all end up as separate Classes due to very slight distinctions which would have been left mechanically undefined in the fruitful void in the early iterations of the game.

So much for the obvious history lesson. I felt I needed that little recap to get to the real subject of the post. In it’s pairing back down of rules, the OSR has generally leaned toward the broader idea of Class, which means fewer Classes. I may be wrong, but I don’t think anybody has felt the need to retro-clone the Cavalier. I should hope not.

I lean toward the extreme end of this trend. Adhering to the credo of “Kill the Cleric, Keep the Thief”, I pretty much use what I think of as the three base Classes: Fighting-Man, Wizard, and Thief (howsoever you name them). In Under the Dying Sun, I call them Slayer, Survivor ,and Sorcerer, and have tried to be very explicit about the broadness of their meaning. I’ll admit that I am using the idea of the Cleric in my Onderland Campaign (recoloured as the Champion), only because I hadn’t reached my stage of current thinking when I began it. I wouldn’t allow it now.

All that said, I too feel the allure of the additional Class. Not so much for the “shiny and new”, but because there are certain Classes which seem to evoke the archetypal feel that a Class should have. Although I feel the Cleric is irrelevant, I still think the idea of the Ranger is cool. I played a Ranger the first time I ever ran through B2 and played his spiritual heir in my longest running campaign. But really, a Ranger is just a Fighter with some woodcraft. Maybe not in AD&D, where he got some of the weirdest-arsed abilities this side of…well, the Bard, but still, you know what I mean.

I’ve been playing with the idea of staying with three Classes, but adding Specialties (not wedded to the name). The spur to this thought was talking with Trey at the Sorcerer’s Skull about Backgrounds in his City setting. But I should note that I am explicitly not thinking of Profession or Background. I am actually thinking of a little something from 2nd Edition.

Yes, yes, pick up your jaw. I know that 2nd edition is generally vilified in the Old-School circles. I think it had a lot of dreck myself. But, in some ways, the worst thing about 2nd Edition was a pattern of good ideas poorly implemented. Look at pretty much anything published for Dark Sun; maybe the one with the surfer dudes. Yeah.

One of the good ideas poorly implemented were "Kits". Kits were supposed to be a little something that you layered onto Class to give a little distinction. The Al-Qadim setting actually did them pretty well. A Fighter could take the Askar kit and be a warrior of the peasants or he could take the Mameluke kit and be a slave raised to be a perfect soldier. A Rogue could take such diverse kits as Merchant, Holy Slayer, or (my favourite) Barber. The idea was that to give some additional flavour and, perhaps, a little mechanical tweak or two. The Askar, maybe the best example, gets a benefit to Reaction rolls from people from his town.

Now, the whole Kit idea ended up being a disaster. TSR began to put out entire books filled with Kits and they became so littered with rules-changes that you might as well have saved yourself the trouble and just made a new Class. But the idea, I’ll contend, had merit and that’s what I’m thinking off.

At first, I was trying to come up with Specialties that could be used by any Class. For example, one called “Woodcraft”. If a Fighter took the Woodcraft Specialty, you’d have a Ranger; a Thief would give us a Scout, and a Wizard would give us a Druid. Each Specialty would give a little something - in this case, hunting and tracking - and then maybe give each particular Class something else. Maybe the Ranger gets a the traditional Combat Bonus (though I think versus animals as suggested here, rather than against humanoids), while the Scout gets maybe the Armour Class bonus of the B/X Halfling or maybe a slight bonus when using the short-bow on horse-back (for that Mongol-warrior thing). Druids? Um, something.

The more I work on it, though, I’m wondering if that’s too limiting. I’m not sure. Anyway, I’ll probably post some sketchy, initial ideas soon.

Savage Doug Takes Up the Challenge!

2010-10-11T20:38:00.000-04:00

Before I could even attempt to do an Underground-style map, Doug at Savage Swords of Athanor designed one. I like it. It shows some real promise to the idea.

The London Underground Comes to the Rescue

2010-10-07T22:15:00.000-04:00

In thinking about some of the problems presented by the Fantasy trip-style of mapping, it suddenly dawned on me that a lot of the same problems had been faced by the London Underground and solved by the clever Harry Beck in his iconic map for the Tube. Earlier maps had been a bit confusing.

Beck's map is totally different.

The genius of this map is that it abandoned geographic realism in favour of abstraction concerned solely with the relation of the various lines and station to each other. Added to this, by denoting the various lines with different colours, it becomes possible to show where they overlap with other lines and still keep it all clear.

This method of mapping only improved over the years. The contemporary map is just a model of clarity. To really see that, you have to zoom into the central loop.

So, this map shows me a great way to do the TFT-style map. Instead of colouring the entire hex, draw fine, coloured lines. Three big advantages to this.

First, it lets you draw straight right and left , as well as up and down, becuase you can draw along the edge of the hex as well as through the middle.

Second, you can easily show different levels running overlapping by having differently coloured lines running parallel in the same hex.

Third, the whole thing becomes so much less cluttered. Look at the tube-map: it's so damn clean.

I think I'm going to play around with this for a little while and see how it goes.

Mapping the Fantasy Trip Way

2010-10-07T20:14:00.002-04:00

Most of us learned the idea of the dungeon map from D&D (which, since D&D arguably created the dungeon-map, makes sense). It is akin to a very simplified blue-print, depicting a top-down, two-dimensional view of the structure on gridded lines. It looks like this:

The Fantasy Trip, that proto-GURPS which evolved itself from a melee-game, suggested something a bit different within it's equivalent to the Dungeon Master's Guide, Into the Labyrinth:

This is, in many ways, a fascinating alternative style of mapping. I want to discuss three.

First, it is most definitely not a blue-print. It is an abstract map that in no way resembles the territory. It is more akin to a series of directions laid out on visual form: turn right here, choose left or right next, and so. That abstraction brings both advantages and disadvantages when compared to what we can call "the classical dungeon map".

The significant disadvantage is readily apparent when you look at it: it is ugly. And by that, I don't just mean aesthetically unappealing (although it is that), it is also much harder to read than the classical map. It comes across as both cramped and cluttered. In addition, by not attempting to replicate the look of the actual dungeon, it does not convey any aesthetic information to the Referee.

Compare it with my humble little map done int he classical style above: my map shows the Referee that the tunnels are winding, irregular, and organic, formed by centuries of water winding through the limestone to create a karst geography. Look at the tunnel running between Areas 2 and 22: the map depicts the wildly varying diameter of this tunnel. Area 22 itslef is supposed to represent a man-made section that has fallen to ruin. None of that appears on the TFT Map.

But the abstraction into direction is helpful too. Imagine a player trying to map that same tunnel. There are no map keys there; barring wandering monsters, there is nothing significant in the tunnel. Do you, as the Referee, want the player to struggle with somehow conveying all of that information on rock-form and diameter and whatnot? Or can the player just draw a line from the tunnel to the south to the tunnel to the north and call it good? After all, mapping adventurers are not cartographers or geologists; they just want to know how to get from Point A to Point B.

Let's turn to the second item. You can't tell unless I give you part of the map key:

This TFT map depicts depth in a two-dimensional format. Part of the reason then that the map appears so cluttered is that it holds six different dungeon-levels on it; the other part of the reason is that the levels ought to be depicted by varying colours but are done in black-and-white. This three-dimensionality is something for which the classical-style map is notoriously unsuited. The D&D books had to resort to cut-aways to give indication of depth and the relationship of the various levels to each other on the horizontal plane. Despite that, most classical map of multiple levels end up stacking neatly on top of each other, so that you get what amounts to an upside-down high-rise. I don't want to get into the mid-80's experiments with three-dimensional maps, such as in the original Ravenloft; suffice it to say that they looked cool, but they were a bit hard to use in play and, more to the point, are beyond the ability of most players to create.

Third, and much less meaningfully, I dare gamers of a certain vintage not to look at the above, imagine that it is in colour, and not think of TSR's board-game, Dungeon, whose board looked like this:

I have many fun memories of playing Dungeon (despite it's flaws), so that exercises a certain appeal to me.

I have never used the TFT-style of mapping, but I must say that I am finding it more and more attractive. It cuts to the heart of the matter in a way that the classical-style doesn't. In making my own maps, I find that the biggest speed bumps are those little representational details that don't matter one white to the players. Indeed, I am embarrassed to say how many times I redrew that blue map up at the top of the post because "I just needed to fix a little something". In someone who is already prone to the procrastination of perfectionism, this is a real problem.

I think I could avoid some of the confused nature of the sample-map by being able to use actual colours. I have already thought to "correct" the proposed colour-scheme by using the actual spectrum (Red, Orange, Yellow, etc.); the key given substitutes Brown for Yellow and I know that I would never remember that in play. Additionally, it would be easier now to depict tunnels crossing over/under each other than it was when that map was drawn by, I think, Ben Ostrander 30 years ago.

I do have some trouble seeing how to represent man-made dungeons in this method, given the inability to draw lines straight left or right, but maybe that is me confusing the map and territory again.

Does Mass Slaughter Need Sprucing Up?

2010-10-07T17:49:00.001-04:00

Loyal, imaginary readers may recall that the Slayer class in Dying Sun have an ability called Mass Slaughter, which is just my renaming of the traditional Fighter benefit of multiple attacks against low-level opponents. As it stands now, the text reads like this:

Mass Slaughter – Slayers gain additional attacks when fighting rabble i.e. 1 Hit Die creatures. They receive a total number of attacks equal to their level. Thus a 4th level Slayer gets 4 attacks versus rabble (instead of the regular 2), while a 10th level Slayer gets 10 attacks (instead of the regular 3). These attacks cannot be split between 1 Hit Die creatures and those of greater Hit Dice; all Mass Slaughter attacks must be made on 1 Hit Die opponents.

There have been debates about this ability for as long as I can recall, specifically as to whether or not it is any good. I like it and think it fits in with the presumed "end game" of YAG, but it does somewhat depend upon the kind of game being played. If you are playing game where higher level characters can expect to be involved in mass battles against armies which are largely composed of 1 HD soldiers, then this ability rocks. It allows the high-level PC to scythe through enemies like a Greek demi-god. On the other hand, if your high-level play continues to revolve around dungeon-crawls then I think we would have to say that the ability isn't too useful. In a high-level dungeon-crawl, you are basically fighting high-level monsters (this situation is somewhat akin to the high-level Cleric and his Turning abilities which JB recently discussed).

Now, I just had a sort of idea that might be interesting. It wouldn't entirely alleviate the dungeon-crawler's lament, but it would add a bit more versatility to the stunt. The idea is that Mass Slaughters applies to creature's of Hit Dice not exceeding 1/3 (round up)of the Slayer's level. Thus, it works for 1 HD foes from levels 1-3, adds in 2 HD foes from levels 4-6, and 3 HD foes from levels 7-10 (which is as high as my charts go).

In a traditional setting (i.e. not Dying Sun), that would mean that 4th level Fighters would get extra attacks versus foes such as Hobgoblins, Gnolls, and Zombies. Under the Dying Sun, that would give the guy extra attacks versus foes such as Sand Ghuls, Troglodytes, and the weird hawk-hounds known as Darzai.

Why 1/3 of the level? Well, it means that you get a boost at 4th level, which is the point at which the Fighter traditionally becomes a Hero and at which you have moved from Basic to Expert level play (or Low to Mid level, if you prefer). Of course, the next transition is traditionally 8th for Fighter (Super-Hero) or 9th (Name level). But since my scope of levels is lower than usual, I'm comfortable with 7th. If you wanted to push further than my chart into 11thg level, you would then transition to 4 HD beings.

I think it might add a little lustre, as it were, without being too powerful. Other thoughts?

Exploration-based Experience for the Dungeon

2010-10-05T18:48:00.002-04:00

I have now done so many posts about experience and advancement, that I have have decided to tag them that way for easy reference. In this case, I am considering tying XP awards directly into dungeon-exploration. A little back-ground first:

It is only relatively recently that I grasped that exploration is the premise of Ye Auld Game. I think James Mal may have been the one to get that through my thick skull. That's been key in my evolving XP rules, such as here and in the proposed Dying Sun rules. But my thought has mostly centered on overland exploration, following in the foot-steps of the estimable Jeff Rients. However, in the process of going back and adding tags to old posts, I stumbled across Five Ways to Avoid Tracking Thousands of Experience Points. One of the ideas caught my eye anew:

4. Characters level up whenever they successfully complete a new level. So, venturing from the 1st dungeon level to the next, if they don't get eaten by the first monster, they level up.

That was flippant and off-hand, but I now think that there is some real meat to this idea. The key is not to focus on getting to the next level, but on exploring the current level.

The Basic Concept: characters earn XP for exploring dungeons.

When I put it that way, I can't believe that I never thought of it before. I mean, that is what the game is supposed to be about, isn't it? The traditional "XP for gold" method is supposed to encourage this (again, I totally misunderstood this for years until Mike Mornard made sense of it for me). And it's not a bad method at all. But it is a little circuitous. And it does have the side-effect of creating of Wiemar Republic-style inflation when a guy has to scrape together 200,000 pieces of gold to make next level. So let's cut out the middle-man and proclaim the following three ideas:

A) The reward for finding treasure is that you have found treasure.

B) The reward for killing monsters is that they cannot eat your spleen.

C) The reward for encountering a keyed area of the dungeon is experience points.

This gives us three distinct rewards which all make sense of the game's premise. You A) collect treasure so that you can hire sell-swords or buy new armour, which allows you to B)kill monsters, who will otherwise eat your spleen and, in sundry other ways, prevent you from C)exploring the dungeon.

Question: What does "exploring" mean exactly?

Answer: It means that the characters have come to understand some portion of the dungeon and can find their way there and back again. That's right: it means mapping. It means no XP if you run away from a spleen-eating monster and get lost. No XP if you are so bad with directions that even you can't figure out where your map leads.

Question: Why "keyed areas" only?

Answer: Insightful question. A classically-designed dungeon is mostly empty. Both the LBB's and Moldvay recommend that only about a third of the rooms have anything worth noting. It seems to me that this makes the keyed areas the ones to find. Yes, you could argue that any rooms should count if the goal is exploration and that's reasonable too, but that gets a bit unwieldy.

Question: Why would that get unwieldy?

Answer: All right, all right; hang on. I haven't gotten there yet. Hang on.

Question: Fine. Then try this: how much experience is a dungeon level worth?

Answer: Now we're back in sync. Let me answer that in bold:

A standard dungeon-level is worth enough experience that a single-class character can advance to the next level upon completion of the exploration.

Traditionally, the Magic-User has the highest XP requirements of any single-classed character; Elves don't count here. An MU needs 2,500 XP to go from Level 1 to Level 2. Therefore, Dungeon Level 1 should give 2,500 XP in total, enough to bring everybody except the poncy Elf to 2nd Level.

And here's where we get to the unwieldy thing from before. It definitely doesn't work to do all that as a lump-sum; the XP has to be parceled out. I first thought about giving XP for each square or hex encountered, but quickly realized that this would become the boring bean-counting exercise I wanted to avoid in the first place. So, instead, we divide that total XP award by the number of keyed areas. If there are 10 keyed areas on the 1st level dungeon, then each area is worth 250 XP. Simple, eh?

Question: Well, maybe, but what if there is a fractional result?

Answer: Then your dungeon is smaller than standard-sized and not worth as much XP in total. Each area is still worth 250.

Question: OK, smart-guy, then what does a standard-sized dungeon mean?

Answer: Noticed that, eh? Well, look, there are sometimes really small levels, such as sub-levels, with only a few rooms. That shouldn't be worth a full level. Conversely, there are sometimes gigantic levels with tons of rooms and that ought to be worth a bit more. So, I pick an entirely arbitrary number and say:

A standard-size dungeon level consists of 10 keyed areas.

I use 10 because it's just the simplest and because the XP tables are full of numbers easily divisible by 10. If we use the classical guidelines, that means a standard dungeon would have about 30 rooms with 10 of those being special and keyed. You could, of course, change those numbers however you like. But if we stick with 10, then we get the following:

Each keyed area of a dungeon's 1st level is worth 250 XP.

Each keyed area of a dungeon's 2nd level is also worth 250 XP.

Each keyed area of a dungeon's 3rd level is worth 500 XP.

Each keyed area of a dungeon's 4th level is worth 1,000 XP.

And so. Lots of room to fiddle if you like; make some areas worth more and others less. In other words: salt to taste.

Question: What does this system do?

Answer: The $100,000 question. It encourages you to explore dungeons. As with the classic system, there is little to incentive to kill monsters other than to save you life. Running away and parlaying don't rob you of even a minimal experience award. It encourages a relatively careful approach to dungeoneering rather than a quick bash-and-grab. You can still bash-and-grab if you like - after all, money is always helpful - but it isn't encouraged by the system.

Question: What does this system not encourage as opposed to the traditional one?

Answer: What is doesn't encourage if fighting for fighting's sake or feeling the need to pilfer every last copper because you are almost at the next level ("I just need 2 more XP!").

Question: Why would entering a room make you better at sword-fighting?

Answer No. 1: Why would picking up a hundred-dollar bill make you better at sword-fighting?

Answer No. 2: YEG's experience rule shave never been about causality or realism. If you want that kind of system, BRP does a nice job of it. XP rules in this game are about encouraging a play-style that supports the game's premise.

A little digression and anecdote about unintended consequences: as a young player, I never gave experience for gold. I honestly think I didn't know I was supposed to for some years. Was that dumb? Maybe. I learned to play by reading the Dungeon Master's Guide, which is an estimable book in many ways, but not as a model of organization. Therefore, what I did was flip around in the tome until I found something of interest and read that. Early on, I stumbled on the bit at the back which listed XP awards for all the monsters in the Monster Manual. I therefore assumed that this was how you earned experience.

I eventually encountered the idea of XP for gold, but summarily rejected it as "stupid". Why would a bag of gold make me better at stabbing things? Stabbing things makes you better at stabbing things so it was XP for killing all the way. The unintended result was to lose the premise of the game. It became, as the stereotype often goes, entirely about killing things and taking their stuff. But since stuff didn't give experience, the only stuff we were interested in was stuff that would help us at the killing of things i.e. magic items.

I can well recall games, staying up late, where we would finish off some monsters and one player would raise his head and say, "Geez! You and you both leveled up, but I'm 750 XP short! Little help?" And the DM (sometimes me), woudl say, "Oh yeah. Well, the giant's brother-in-law then comes over the hill to fight."

Question: Well then, what are the potential drawbacks or unintended consequences of this system?

Answer: Drawbacks? You cheeky bugger! Hmn. Well, it could give players a notion that they may have missed some rooms, if you tend to make standard-sized levels: "Hey, we only got 2,250 XP. I'll bet there is 1 more room somewhere that we missed." But I don't see that as a major problem since that's really the DM's fault for making his dungeon's too standard."

And that's about that. Combine it with the overland experience for exploring rules (which are, essentially the same substituting a keyed hex for a keyed dungeon area) and you have a game entirely about exploration. The more I think about it, the more I like it. But I'm sure some perceptive, hypothetical reader will try and find a problem or two. Please do.

Gedankenexperiment: Vancian Rarity

2010-10-04T18:32:00.002-04:00

"In ages gone," the Sage had said, his eyes fixed on a low star, "a thousand spells were known to sorcery and the wizards effected their wills. Today...a hundred spells remain to man's knowledge, and these have come to us through the ancient books..."

The Dying Earth, Jack Vance

We all talk about the Vancian magic system in Ye Auld Game, but 99% of the time we are talking specifically about "fire and forget". Vance's strikingly original presentation of memorizing and forgetting spells is certainly one of the most unique in literature, but there is actually more to Vance's magic than just that. The quote above is the one that always sparked my imagination. These arrogant wizards know that, in fact, they have a tenth of the knowledge of their predecessors and, rather than convince them to pool their resources, it actually makes them guard the few spells they have both zealously and jealously.

Now, that's something I could do with more of in YEG. So, imagine this:

Whatever iteration of the game you are playing, the 1st level Magic-User spells are the entire syllabus of known spells.

Fly? You wish. Fireball? Who can shoot exploding balls of fire; this is magic sonny, not comic-books.

Of course, everyone knows that there are, in fact, other spells out there. Every first-year sorcerer has read that bit of Laconius where he mentions the Miraculous Mantle of Obfuscation, which renders the user invisible, and the intemperate uses to which he put it in relation to the Witches' Coven of Outreterre Or known the frustration of studying that antique blabber-mouth Quinquarine, who, over the course of several volumes, promises to reveal the formula obscurely referred to as The Perambulatory Revelator of One-and-All, only to have no copies of the final volume survive the bonfires of the Irenian Orthodoxists. Or stared at the great tapestry at Biancule, depicting the turning of the invasion of the Mauvrian Hordes, and wondered what incantation allowed the fabled archimagus Villondro to enmesh the Mauvrians in gigantic spider-webs?

So, of course there are more than just these twelve spells. That's why you are crawling down a hole in the ground with a party of cerebrally-challenged bravos, cut-purses, and roustabouts, facing death a hundred times over in the form of goblins, traps, and pneumonia, instead of staying in a nice cosy manse somewhere, casting Charm Person over and over for a hundred crowns a pop. Because there are more spells out there.

And whoever finds even one of them, is going to be star among the thaumaturgical-set. Seriously, people are going to be hitting you up right, left, and center for just a peek at your grimoire; the grimoire that contains the only known copy of Ariste's Vertical Realignment in the world (even if some slack-witted copyist wrote it down as Levitation. But, hey, that error kept the thing lost all these centuries 'til you found it, so be nice to the guy). You now become famous as "So-and-So the Levitator" and anybody who needs something vertically-realigned has to come to you; either to pay for the privilege or to try and steal your spell (recall, in this context, the bit in The Dying Earth where Turjan crashes the chambers of Prince Kandive).

The Referee is going to place far fewer scrolls containing spells above Level 1 in this game because even a single Level 2 spell is a major treasure. Spell-Scrolls retain their value , of course, because of fire-and-forget. The Referee is also much freer to cut off the spell list wherever he likes. Don't like the Wish spell? Fine; it never need come up. In fact, if you don't like the whole concept of spells above level 6, say, then that's easy enough too.

One additional option is that one may want is to grant all MU's the entire Level 1 list in the books at start, in part for compensation and also because it sounds right to me. I'm influenced here by Stephan Michael Secchi's Talislanta. There were some thirteen "Basic Spells", including the Spell of Eldritch Power, the Spell of Conjuration, and the Spell of Radiance. Anyone who had made it to 1st level had mastered those. As Secchi puts it:

The following list of spells forms the basis of Talislantan magical tradition, and represents a body of knowledge common to all practitioners of magic, regardless of race, nationality or profession. Apprentice spell casters spend years learning to master the complex verbal and somatic components of these powerful incantations, the origins of which date back to the Age of Mystery. So ancient are these spells that their authors' names have long since been forgotten.

Talislanta Handbook and Campaign Guide (1989)

At that point, one could have an entire career in magic with just those thirteen spells. Anything beyond involved digging lost librams or stealing from someone else. And then there were the big prizes: the spells of the Archaeans, the originators of magic, who were able to craft spells that far exceeded later ones in terms of horse-power and scope.

Experience Penalties for Quasi-Men Under the Dying Sun

2010-09-29T17:47:00.001-04:00

I have wrestled with how to handle Quasi-Men in Dying Sun for a while. I think my rules for them have improved immensely over time. But, I just realized that my shiny new, smallinated XP rules create a problem in this area. I previously had Desert Men suffer a -5% penalty on earned experience and Scorpion Men suffer -15%. That doesn't work so much when we have reduced the XP awards down to units of 1.

I've never liked level limits and won't use them here. So, here's an idea I am playing with and I'd love some feedback:

Desert Men need 1 extra points of experience to advance to 2nd level (i.e., need 21 XP to get to 2nd level); thereafter, the required extra experience doubles (i.e., need 42 for 3rd; need 84 for 4th, etc.)

Scorpion Men need 3 extra points of experience per level to advance (i.e., need 23 XP to get to 2nd level; need 46 for 3rd; need 92 for 4th, etc.)

This accurately preserves the -5% and -15% penalties without us needing to have fractions. I think it's pretty clean.

Places under the Dying Sun: The Floating Garden of Unearthly Delights

2010-09-28T20:32:00.000-04:00

The Floating Garden of Unearthly Delights (200 XP on view; 800 XP on entering)

The Floating Garden is a popular traveler’s tale of paradise and horror. It is rumoured to lie in various places over the centuries, much like the equally fabulous Black Ziggaraut. That is because the Garden manifests as a hyper-spatial anomaly on this world and can appear literally anywhere.

When it manifests, it appears as an oasis of stunningly large and succulent plants. This would be recognized as a jungle on our world, but such a thing is unknown under the Dying Sun. The anomaly appears as a circular manifestation of 1 mile in diameter. Once it appears, it will remain for 1D hours before vanishing.

If the Floating Garden is entered, travelers will immediately note the humid air, filled with the sounds of birds and humming of insects. The sky is a royal blue with a golden orb hanging there, giving pleasing warmth. Rivulets of clean water are almost everywhere and even a large party can quickly fill up its water-bags. The place is home to a vast profusion of animals and plants and the Referee is encouraged to include anything he likes, such as dinosaurs or reptile folk.

As long as the hyper-spatial anomaly persists, travelers may emerge from the Garden as easily as they entered. However, once this trans-dimensional extrusion vanishes, the traveler will be unable to exit. Wherever the traveler goes, he will simply find more jungle. The Garden of Unearthly Delights is, in fact, a closed-loop universe like a globe covering some 100 square miles. There is no edge or end to the Garden; anyone travelling in any one direction for more than 50 miles will simply find himself back where he started, having circled the globe.

At any time, there is a chance (11+) of finding other stranded travelers within the Garden. These may be human or not, may come from the character’s world or from ultra-terrene realities. As with the animal inhabitants, the Referee is free to let his imagination run wild here. A Lord of the Flies scenario is certainly plausible, with the stranded folk having become wild barbarians, as is the classic Lost World set-up, with a colony of antique Mycenaeans, for example, having survived in this pocket-cosmos. The inhabitants may have formed a new society; is it one that welcomes new additions to widen the gene pool or is it homicidally xenophobic?

A new trans-dimensional extrusion is formed every 2D days, although whether or not the trapped travelers are there to see it is up to chance. This extrusion might appear anywhere and not necessarily under the Dying Sun.

Reactions Under the Dying Sun

2010-09-27T21:47:00.000-04:00

I am a late convert to the use of the Reaction Roll. I never, ever used Reactions Rolls or Morale or the Hireling Reaction roll during my first phase of gaming (aka the 1980’s). Back then, I scoffed at the idea of having the dice tell me how monsters and npc’s would reaction to things; was I not the Dungeon Master? I knew what would happen.

It is only recently that I have come to see the usefulness of these things. And, much more recently, I realized that while Spellcraft & Swordplay does have Morale rules, it does not have Monster or Hireling Reaction rolls. What appears below is meant to add those back into Under the Dying Sun.

Alert, imaginary readers will note that none of these mechanics are exactly what have been presented in other iterations of the game. I was, however, guided by the versions that appeared in Tom Moldvay’s Basic Rules. Somewhere (and I can’t recall where; feel free to remind me), I saw the suggestion that if you look at Moldvay’s Monster and Hireling reaction tables, you can see what looks like two specific expressions of an implied, underlying, universal mechanic. The mechanic is, in essence:

Roll 2d6
2 is terrible
3-5 is bad
6-8 is neutral
9-11 is good
12 is fantastic.

Granted, the Morale rules don’t follow that - being a simple binary mechanic of flight or fight - but nevertheless, that idea struck a chord within me. I had long played with the idea that Basic/Expert D&D had certain strivings toward being a 2d6 system; a striving I wanted to tease out. That was, in fact, one of the reasons S&S so appeals to me.

So, taking the idea of an underlying, universal reaction mechanic based on 2d6, I present the following:

REACTION ROLLS

Players usually have full control over their reactions and behavior. But, the attitudes of non-player characters may be more randomly determined. Whenever the characters encounter someone else, human or otherwise, the Referee may wish to make a Reaction Roll. If the creature met is mindless or would obviously be disposed in some way toward the characters, the Reaction Roll can be eliminated.

The Referee may add modifiers as seem appropriate. The lead character’s CHA is the most common modifier. The Reaction Roll is compared to the table below: find the Difficulty Condition modifier required to make the roll a success (11+). This gives the nature of the reaction. A roll of boxcars is automatically an “Extremely Positive” result.

The interpretation of the Reaction Result is made by the Referee based upon the circumstances. Some guidelines are given below.

Encountering Hostiles

If the encounter is between potential hostiles, including predatory beasts, the following results:

Morale

Non-player characters will usually make morale rolls at two points in combat: first, when they suffer their first casualty; second, when the force is reduced to half it’s initial strength. Retainers make Morale Rolls just as any other non-player character.

Hiring Retainers

The players may wish to hire the services of mercenaries, porters, guides, and so on. Once such individuals are found, the player may make an offer and roll:

Gedankenexperiment: Treble the Price of Everything

2010-09-24T22:10:00.000-04:00

Over on Geoffrey McKinney's blog, I've been part of a discussion on the role of money and equipment in the game. The starting point was Geoffrey's statement that the equipment list, so important at 1st level, becomes irrelevant soon thereafter. You agonize over whether or not to to take the sword, knowing that won't leave you enough for chain-mail, or to just accept the mace for now. But once you come back from your first expedition, that's pretty much over - when you have a bulging bag of silver and gold, the difference between 8 gp and 10 gp is meaningless.

I really feel Geoffrey's point. Scrimping and saving - heck, debating whether or not to try and steal that nice sword - scream D&D to me. The problem is that since you need cash to level up, most games don't work if the players only make it out alive with a brass farthing and two subway tokens.

This idea ties in to my proposed experience rules for Dying Sun, which, notably, do not include XP for treasure. The idea for me is that treasure is it's own reward in a game where the characters are cash-poor. I've compounded this by reducing starting monies to 20-120 rather than 30-180. But this still isn't enough! I don't want to get bogged down by "reality", but in the real world, a sword was, until recently, a great treasure in and of itself. That's the real reason that it was a sign of rank; it was friggin' expensive. And plate armour? Plate armour was like a Lamborghini or something. Medieval knights essentially made a living off of taking the arms and armor of their foes (or ransoming them back to their families).

With that in mind, play this little game: treble the price of everything in the book. I'm looking at Labyrinth Lord because it's right in front of me, but use any iteration you like. That standard-issue sword now costs 30 gp. With a bad roll, that might be the only thing you can afford. Why would anybody ever take the much-crummier spear? Because at 9 gp, it's value for money. Chain mail now costs 210 gp - well out of reach of any starting character. So, your typical 1st level Fighter goes from a hauberk-clad swordsman to a guy with a spear and studded leather.

Does that suck? Well, maybe. But it also gives you a damn good reason to go risk life and limb crawling down holes in the dirt; a guy's gotta make the rent somehow. What it also does is give a real zest to ordinary items. The 1st level Fighter is dying to get ahold of chain-mail and a sword. Yeah, a plain old sword. Even one that a dirty orc was using. D&D characters can't be choosers. Of course, he probably won't be able to scavenge that mail-coat that he just tore up to kill the orc; damn! But he can loot every pocket for every last copper piece and try and save up for the day when he can afford a shiny new coat of mail for his own. And, off on the horizon, the day when he might be able to buy an actual suit of plate, which at 1,350 gp is truly something only the great champions of the realm could ever have.

Gedankenexperiment: Recasting B/X Demi-Humans as Human Classes

2010-09-24T19:12:00.001-04:00

Seems as if a lot of folks out there are interested in running their version of Ye Auld Game with a more Sword & Sorcery flavour. S&S is a relentlessly humanistic genre; if you want to try and extract some theme from an entire genre, you could do worse than this for S&S: "people are venal and petty, but they are, ultimately all we have." Or, as a famous hill-man has it, Crom helps those who help themselves.

Theology aside, the multi-species Fellowship of the Ring model implied by the rules is fairly contrary to the humanocentric nature of S&S. So sitting awake the other night with a fever, I decided to engage in a little thought-experiment in using the B/X version of demi-humans as human classes. I'll list the basic recasting (using the class as written with no changes other than the flavour text), followed by an option or two which might make a slightly better fit (alert, imaginary readers know that I can't resist fiddling with rules).

* The Elf becomes the Dabbler (aka the Picaro): The Dabbler is a man of many talents who learns swordplay as easily as spell-casting. The sacrifice is that he will quickly be outstripped in those fields by those who concentrate in them (the Fighter and the Magic-User). Still, the Dabbler has an admirable breadth of skills to bring to any situation; in addition to fighting and sorcery, he is also a linguist (the extra languages), a man with a keen eye for secrets (Detect Secret Doors), and, perhaps most usefully, a fellow who knows how to get out of the way of danger (Saving Throws).

Option: Drop the resistance to ghoul paralyzation, which never made any sense to me for actual Elves, much less a Gray Mouseresque Dabbler.

Option: Drop infravision. One might replace it with better night vision.

Option: Get rid of the Detect Secret Doors ability (I'd give it to the Delver class below). One might exchange it for unlimited level advancement.

Option: If you are going full S&S on this, then you probably won't want humanoids any more than demi-humans. Replace the humanoid languages with other human languages, or ancient eldritch scripts, or something more S&S in tone.

[I was originally thinking of making this class more of a Jedi Knight - a mystic warrior. And, of course, Jedi are cool. But that's a little too campaign specific and isn't very S&S anyway. Still, it might be a cool option for another type of game]

* The Dwarf becomes the Delver (aka the Dungeoneer aka the Tomb Raider): The Delver is a specialist in plundering ancient tombs and ruins for profit. He brings with him an expertise in stonework and masonry; he can spot the tricks and traps the ancients built into their dungeons and, if he can't spot them, he's good at dodging them. To that end, he's made a study of the languages of those who dwell underground (Kobolds, Gnomes). But don't call him just a thief; he's a trained warrior because the most dangerous trap can be a monster. He isn't proficient with two-handed weapons - too bulky when raiding a dungeon - but he's a match for any Fighter otherwise.

Option: Drop the infra-vision. As with the Dabbler, maybe replace with better dark vision.

Option: Give the Elf's Detect Secret Door ability to the Delver.

Option: As with the Dabbler, drop the humanoid languages, since there won't be any humanoids.

Option: I could see reducing Hit Dice to D6 to make the delver more in line with the Cleric as a limited warrior. Again, the trade-off could be the unlimited advancement. If that doesn't seem enough, I could see reducing the XP requirements to match the Fighters.

* The Halfling becomes the Ranger (aka the Scout): The Ranger is the wilderness warrior we all know and love. He isn't proficient with the bulky greatsword, which isn't much use in the forests, but he can use pretty much anything and is especially good with missiles. In the wilds, his wood-lore makes him is virtually invisible and even in the dungeon, he can stand so still as to be unnoticed much of the time. The Ranger is particularly trained in the endless war against the gigantic marauders which haunt the wastes and has learned how to avoid their clumsy blows to an amazing degree (-2 AC vs. giant-class).

Option: Change the -2 AC to a +2 to hit. This makes him more like the AD&D Ranger and makes a little more sense.

Option: As before, humanoids aren't that S&S. Replace the -2 AC to apply only against animals, as the Ranger has learned how to stave off the attacks of wild beasts. Yeah, yeah: animals don't sound that cool. But animals in B/X are pretty damn tough. And I would let in apply to something like an Owlbear, which is, after all, just two natural animals combined. It might apply to other things like Displacer Beasts and so on.

Option: If you see the class as less of a horse-mounted scout and more of a woodland hunter, then you gotta let them use the longbow . If that seems unfair, you might disallow plate armour or weapons designed only for war (like the sword).

Option: Give them a tracking ability. Maybe in exchange for the -2 AC if it seems too much to you.

Option: I would, for free, give them an improved ability to hunt. Unlike other characters, they only need take half a day to hunt; if they do take a whole day, they get twice of many supplies.

I could totally see playing a game with these classes. I actually could see playing a Delver as fun, even though I have never, ever wanted to play a Dwarf. As always, let me know what you think.

Smallinating Experience

2010-09-22T16:27:00.001-04:00

(Yeah, I've been watching too much Phineas and Ferb with my kids lately)

Looking back at yesterday's post, something occurred to me. In the standard version of Ye Auld Game, 1 gp = 1 XP, which requires you to collect an awful lot of XP to level up. Thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands. I must confess to never being crazy about the scale of the numbers. I'm also not thrilled with the bean-counting on the preferred XP award scheme for monsters.

Now, I solved that later problem by going back to the original scheme of 100 XP/HD. And now I realize that if I keep all the XP awards in nice round numbers like that, I can smallinate (i.e. decrease) the awards and the requires by a factor of of 100! It just requires one change to yesterday's scheme, which I was considering anyway:

Encountering a Monster for the 1st Time: 100 XP (instead of 50XP/HD + 50/special ability).

With that, and my already nicely-rounded advancement table from Empire of the Petal Throne, I can divide everything by 100.

Surviving in the Wilderness: 1 XP/day

Visiting A New Place: 1-10 XP depending upon difficulty and strangeness

Deciphering Artifacts: 1 XP base + additional 1 XP/difficulty modifier

Encountering a Monster for the 1st Time: 1 XP

Defeating Opponents: 1 XP/Hit Die + 1 XP/special ability

Defeating Sorcerous Item in Ego Struggle: 1 XP/item CHA

Mind-Altering Experience: 1-10 XP depending upon extent of alteration.

The advancement then goes:

Level 2: 20 XP

Level 3: 40 XP

Level 4: 80 XP

Level 5: 160 XP

etc.

Experience Under the Dying Sun

2010-09-21T21:20:00.001-04:00

Towards the end of last year, I began to think hard about how I wanted to award experience in Under the Dying Sun. When I left it, I had a lot of ideas, but nothing concrete. I've made a lot of progress on this though recently. Alert, imaginary readers no doubt picked up on this in my recent posting of some locales, such as the Ruined City of Thanjivar and the City of the Crocodile God, which included XP awards for visiting them. This idea was cheerfully stolen from Jeff Rients, who has entirely too many cool ideas and therefore won't miss it. I find the idea of giving experience for exploration just so mind-blowingly right that I can't believe it never occurred to me. And the idea is so expandable; after all, exploration need not be geographical. I love the idea of giving XP for reading ancient tomes, for instance.

So, here's the current draft of the Experiences Rules for Dying Sun. I expect that most will find their way into my more usual D&D games as well.

EXPERIENCE

Characters earn experience somewhat differently in than in the Spellcraft & Swordplay core rules. There is comparatively little treasure to be garnered under the Dying Sun and victory in such a world is accounted for by living another day. In addition, character’s progress by visiting new places and expanding the boundaries of their rapidly contracting world.

Surviving in the Wilderness: 100 XP/day

Visiting A New Place: 100-1,000 XP depending upon difficulty and strangeness

Deciphering Artifacts: 100 XP base + additional 100 XP/difficulty modifier

Encountering a Monster for the 1st Time: 50 XP/Hit Die + 50 XP/special ability

Defeating Opponents: 100 XP/Hit Die + 100 XP/special ability

Defeating Sorcerous Item in Ego Struggle: 100 XP/item CHA

Mind-Altering Experience: 100-1,000 XP depending upon extent of alteration.

Surviving in the Wilderness is one of the key ideas of the setting - the struggle of Man vs. a brutal Nature.

Visiting A New Place relies on Referee fiat to determine how difficult the journey and strange the locale. A truly notable locale, such as the Ruined City of Thanjivar or Devil Lake are worth 1,000 XP. A new village never before seen is worth 100 XP. As the wording implies, this XP award can only come once, the first time the place is visited.

Encountering a Monster for the 1st Time reflects the strangeness that the word “monster” is supposed to imply. Unlike other iterations of the game, “monster” is not equivalent to “non-player character”.

Defeating Opponents is not restricted to killing them; any time the character denies the opponent his goal in a dangerous conflict, the experience is earned. Thus, knocking them out, getting them trapped, or cleverly avoiding them are all viable means of earning XP in all fight. But this award goes further: defeating an opponent in a duel of wits, foiling their plot to assassinate someone else, denying then the appointment of general are all examples of defeating an opponent.

The Referee will determine what constitutes a “dangerous conflict”, but essentially any contest in which substantial harm could accrue to the character or allies if he loses qualifies. For example, winning game of chess is not usually a dangerous conflict; however, if the character is playing a game of human chess in order to save his companions lives would count.

A final note: defeating an opponent should never be decided upon a simple die roll, but should, instead, involve some player choice. In the above-example of the chess game, if the player wins the game because the Referee lets him make an INT Throw to play better than his foe, no experience is earned. On the other hand, while combat is resolved through the process of rolling dice, it usually involves more than one throw and definitely involves choices on the player’s part as to strategy. That is an acceptable case of defeating an opponent.

Mind-Altering Experience is a catch-all category for anything that might change the character beyond than the previous categories. Reading a technical manual of the ancients, finding an army of cryogenically-preserve True Men, telepathically touching the Universal Mind, discovering the truth about the Grand Tyrant of Hajal - all of these would be candidates for experience awards.

Places Under the Dying Sun: The City of the Crocodile God

2010-09-16T20:08:00.001-04:00

The City of the Crocodile God (1,000 XP)

Nestled within the grasslands of the Valley of the Mariners is the City of the Crocodile God. It is a weird city of metal enclosed within the remains of a great dome, composed of some unknown glass-like substance of sea-blue. Presumably built by the Senex at some point, it is now inhabited by a tribe of Wildmen who must have stumbled upon it at some point and decided to settle therein. The Wildmen, however much they may realize the ridiculousness of it, will brook no talk of the city’s “founders”; they staunchly maintain that they built the domed city upon the instructions of the eponymous tutelary deity.

The inhabitants have no idea what the city was originally called and they have not given it a proper name themselves. “The City of the Crocodile God” is the only term they will use for it. They regard it as a holy place, for it houses their patron god, a similarly nameless being called only “the Crocodile God”. The People of the Crocodile God believe that this being is the oldest living thing in the world and, at the end of time, he will eat the world itself. They regard it is as their divine mission to keep the god’s hunger appeased as long as possible and, in so doing, prolong the dying of the world. Any talk of a “dying sun” is considered rank heresy and immediately consigns one to the only penal sentence which exists in the city: feeding the appetite of the Crocodile God.

The Crocodile God resides in a tremendous amphitheatre, approximately 2 miles in circumference, which was filled with water at some point and which has become a swamp. It seems likely that this was once a stadium for the builders of the city and only later became a divine abode. Steps of the ubiquitous metal of which the city is built descend into the swamp, whose waterline is some 30 feet above the ground-level of the city; whether or not the swamp is deeper than that, nobody knows.

The Crocodile God himself appears to be a massive Magara, adapted (or re-adapted perhaps) to an amphibious life. He is at least 30 feet long; possibly longer as he is never seen in his entirety. In general only his lambent, yellow eyes, a good half-foot in diameter, are seen above the water’s surface. Sacrifices to this deity are tied up and tossed into the swamp with much barbaric ritual; the god often watches the proceedings (with how much interest is anybody’s guess), but does not attack the victim who swiftly sinks under the water’s slimy surface. It is assumed that the sacrifice is then swallowed by the great beast at his leisure. Since Magara continue to grow through-out their lives, it must be assumed that Crocodile God is a tremendously old animal, even if he is not quite as ancient as the Wildmen believe.

The folk of the City of the Crocodile God, numbering about 100 in all, have an undying hatred for Hajal, which diverted the Shavathi from the Valley of the Mariners centuries ago and thus deprived them of their natural water-source. How the brutes recall this is unclear. Their chief, who styles himself “Amdrut, Emperor of all Mariners, Beloved of the Crocodile God, and Sword of the Faith” constantly schemes to march upon Hajal and burn it to the ground. This seems rather unlikely.

It would be easy enough to ignore this strange city, save for the store of Senex artifacts which surely still lie within. Parts of the city have artificial lighting, which seems to turn on and off at irregular intervals. Several cylindrical tubes which bear cursory resemblance to those flying platforms known as “vimana” have been found, although no one has yet deciphered their use. On the other hand, the antique slug-throwers found therein have been readily put to their intended use by treasure-hunters, usually upon the Crocodile People.

2010-09-14T22:05:00.000-04:00

Continuing what seems to be Old Home Week:

A year ago, I posted the beginning of an idea for Sorcerous Items. These are one version of magic weapons for Dying Sun (the other version is an Artifact). I've added a few things to the mix since then, so I thought I'd post the update. One major addition I just came up with is "Increasing the Psychic Shadow". I'm rather tickled by this idea right now. It solves the old "trade-up" issue with magic weapons by having the weapon grow in power with the character. Which seems much more appropriate to my setting. Plus, it has a nice, creepy, double-edge to it that also feels right. Let me know what you think.

SORCEROUS ITEMS

All sentient beings constantly emit low levels of psionic energy (“psions”) which are absorbed by inanimate matter. In this fashion, some psychic sorcerers “read” items through the use of psychometry. The psychic residue of immensely powerful individuals may permeate objects to which they have a long or extremely emotional relationship in such a fashion as to create a psychic imprint of themselves. From this, sorcerous items are brought into existence.

The most usual method of imprinting a sorcerous item is by using an object to kill a being with an exceptional sense of self (CHA 10+); the murderer being’s “psychic shadow” clings tentatively to that which ended its physical life. In other cases, the exceptional individual will establish such a long term and volatile relationship with the object (such as a conqueror who uses the same sword in all his battles), that his psychic shadow will be imprinted on the item. In either case, it can be seen that all such items are unique; there is no such thing as a “generic” sorcerous item.

For reasons given above, the majority of sorcerous items are tools of war and this category of objects is also called “psychic weapons”. There are other examples, how-ever. The regalia of an Archwizard will become imprinted after centuries of use; these crowns, scepters, and jewels are powerful objects able to bend men’s mind with ease.

The Psychic Shadow

All sorcerous items reflect the personality of their original. Some are but pale reflections of the former being while others are virtual copies. The strength of the psychic shadow is measured by the item’s CHA score. Although only beings with exceptional (10+) CHA may serve as the basis of the sorcerous item, not all sorcerous items imprint the full degree of the creator’s essence.

Item Charisma

When a sorcerous item is found, the Referee should roll 2D to determine the CHA of the item. A low CHA item will have only the barest hints of the original left, usually a vague emotion of some sort. Such an item will also have very little in the way of power. The higher CHA item’s will have progressively more coherent personalities, emotions, thoughts, goals, and powers.

Item Goals

Since sorcerous items feel themselves to be alive, they adopt goals. These may range from a yearning to kill for low CHA items to complex plots to control the world by high CHA items. The Referee may assign a goal to any sorcerous items or may roll on the following table:

The Referee may find it helpful to determine the INT and/or WIS of sorcerous items as well as the CHA. A highly intelligent item will likely have a more complex Goal than a low intelligence one; or, perhaps, a more complex means of achieving that Goal. An item with a high WIS may be more obsessed with it’s Goal than one with a low WIS.

Ego Struggle

Because sorcerous items are the residue of strong egos, they will not simply accept being someone else’s tool. Whenever a sorcerous item is touched, an Ego Struggle occurs. The person touching the item must make a CHA Throw, with the object’s CHA modifiers effecting the roll (thus, an object with CHA 12, will levy a -2 to the person’s Throw).

If the Throw is failed, the character suffers Domination by the item (as per the 2nd level Discipline). The dominated individual will be controlled by the item to further it’s goal—whatever that might be. Items with CHA 4- will have no articulated goal and their domination will manifest more as strange moods.

As with the 2nd level Discipline, a dominated being is entitled to a new CHA Throw whenever commanded to something which he finds repugnant. If a subsequent Throw succeeds, the character may toss the sorcerous item aside (or keep it and fight another Ego Struggle).

If the character wins the initial Ego Struggle, it is he who dominates the item, bend-ing it’s psychic shadow to his will. Whenever the item is forced to do something drastically opposed to it’s goal, the character must struggle again to maintain control. If the item wins this subsequent Ego Struggle, it breaks free of its owner. The owner may discard the item or attempt to dominate it again on the subsequent round.

And so it goes. Wielding a Sorcerous Item is a constant struggle, just like everything else under the Dying Sun.

Increasing the Psychic Shadow

The relationship between a sorcerous item and its possessor is a symbiotic one: the possessor gets the use of the item’s abilities, while the item’s psychic shadow feeds off of the psychic energy of the possessor. This leeching is minute and not generally harmful to the wielder. But over time, it may result in the strengthening of the psychic shadow.

Every time that the possessor of a sorcerous item goes up in level, the item gains 1 point of CHACHA means that the item’s personality will become more distinct and the item will acquire new abilities. It also means that the Ego Struggles become more difficult. Therefore, a character who possesses a psychic weapon faces a choice: the longer he keeps the item, the more powerful it is likely to become, but the stronger the pull of its ego.

Considering Alignment Anew

2010-09-14T19:15:00.000-04:00

Yes, I have debated whether or not to use Ye Auld's Lawful-Neutral-Chaotic alignment system before. I more-or-less dismissed it here and brought it back here, both over a year ago. Sigh. But I'm back with renewed vigour on the project and I find myself going back to my original rejection of Alignment as-is. I'd stress that this is purely in regards to Under the Dying Sun and not Ye Auld Game in general; as I posted before, the triune alignment system works very well for most of the straight-up fantasy settings I can imagine. But, as I said in the first post on the subject:

...grand cosmic conceptions of Chaos and Order seem a bit alien to my vision of Athas [obviously not Athas anymore]. This is an intellectually impoverished world where people are mostly just trying to not die from dehydration, falling into silt lakes, or being eaten by Halflings...er...Wild Men.

And mechanically, it seems useless as there is no Protection from Evil Discipline or alignment-bearing magic swords.

I find myself going back to the idea of what might be called "Basic Instinct" (although I'm of an age where I don't think I could actually use that name without making a beaver joke). The idea was for the player to define one elemental urge around which the character operates: Food, Love, Sex, Power, Knowledge, Freedom, and so on. It won't have any mechanical meaning, but it would serve as a kind of one word resume of back-story and motivation and all those other role-playing concepts that are cool and all, but which take up a lot of time to create and which seem to have really been a waste of time when you die five minutes into the game, having been eaten by an ill-tempered weed or a crafty, psychic octopus.

Still, even a one-word thing might be more work than you want to demand from a player. Maybe the concept isn't worth keeping at all. I'm struggling on this one.

Mutation Table: Take Two

2010-09-14T17:54:00.001-04:00

The first stab was here. This version has more potions and more details. A No-Prize to anyone who sees where the Muse left me (hint: look at Minor Cosmetic, No. 6); suggestions welcome (maybe Hair Quantity - either hairless or hirsute?)

A Thought on Starting Funds

2010-09-13T22:20:00.000-04:00

Just had a random thought about starting monies. This thought was in context of Under the Dying Sun, but could apply to any iteration of Ye Auld Game. It's simply this: starting monies equal CHAx10. I find the idea very appealing as A)it reduces the number of rolls at chargen and B)makes CHA a bit more obviously useful at the beginning of the game. Oh, well, and it kind of makes sense. It means the guys with more money are necessarily the guys better able to obtain hirelings, whether simply because of filthy lucre, or because they are better class, or whatever.

Mutants Under the Dying Sun

2010-09-13T21:54:00.000-04:00

Following up from this post about playable races. I'm convinced, I'm convinced: the species presented in earlier drafts are too indebted to Dark Sun. I'm definitely keeping Desert Men and Scorpion Men. I'm dropping Helots and Wild Men. But I also realized that I was being silly (read: stupid) in mentioning and then dismissing mutants. Mutants should be a go. I think that I shied away from them because I didn't want to add in complex rules for mutations and whatnot. I still don't, but I no longer believe that I need to.

I do not want crazy, Gamma World mutants (note: I like crazy Gamma World, but not for this game). In my mind, mutants under the Dying Sun are the kind of guys you would see in the Den and Taarna segments of Heavy Metal or wandering the streets of Cynosure in Grimjack (the Tim Truman Grimjack).

So, what follows is a first draft. Let me know what you think.

Mutants

Uncounted millennia of radiation, atmospheric pollution, and weird science-sorceries have had a notable impact upon the make-up of those beneath the Dying Sun. This is no less true for Men than any other beast. Mutants abound beneath the Dying Sun. They sport odd features; although most are minor, such as unusual coloration of skin, hair, or eyes, some mutants are truly monstrous in appearance.

True Men tend to view Mutants with contempt and distaste. Those settlements controlled by True Men will make Mutants second-class citizens or slaves. Despite the True Man’s term of “Quasi- Man”, mutants are not actually aspirate species and those which are not born sterile are able to breed with True Men. In more mixed populations, mutants may pass without comment and the products of mixed unions not uncommon.

At character creation, after assigning Ability Scores, roll once on the Mutation Table

Abilities may be raised as high 13 (super-human) due to bonuses and as low as 2 (sub-human) due to penalties. But note that bonuses must be equivalent to penalties; if a cap is reached then both bonus and penalty are reduced to the fullest extent that they can reach. For example, a Mutant with a STR 10 and CHA 4 rolls 2 on the Table and then rolls a modifier of "3". It is possible to raise the STR to 13 (10+3), but it isn't possible to lower CHA to 1 (4-3). The lowest CHA possible is 3, which is a modifier of 2. Therefore, STR is only raised to 12 (10+2) in this case.

A Thought About Psychic Combat

2010-09-10T19:14:00.001-04:00

I'm pretty satisfied with my treatment of psychic sorcery aka psionics in Dying Sun. I'm especially pleased with making Psychic Combat mirror physical combat, as that keeps a lot of the cool, tactical nature of Ye Auld Game's system, while making it cleaner too. But one thing bugs me: it's asymmetrical. What I mean is that with 5 Modes of each type (Attack and Defense) and three relevant Abilities (INT, WIS, and CHA), you can't match things up neatly.

See, only 1 Attack Mode damages CHA, as opposed to 2 each for INT and WIS. Because of that, only 1 Defense Mode is good at protecting CHA. Is this a dumb concern? Probably. But you know how I love symmetry in design. If I were to follow that impulse, I would have to change the whole basis of the thing, by adding another Mode in each category.

Which broaches the larger question: is it worthwhile to keep those names from YEG? Crikey, is it even legal to use those names? I never even thought about that. Hmn.

Playable Races under the Dying Sun

2010-09-10T16:54:00.000-04:00

For a long time now, I've been working on the idea that the races in Dying Sun would all be analogous to those in Dark Sun. This wasn't really a conscious decision; it just resulted from the idea having begun as a Dark Sun hack that changed so much that I decided to make it my own. Of course, the races are all changed: Elves to Desert Men, Halflings to Wild Men, Muls to Helots, and Mantis Men to Scorpion Men (with Half-Giants entirely dropped). But still, not to hard to work out the analogies.

Almost a year later, the always -clever Tim Kirk asks me, "Why have all those Dark Sun races?" And I don't really have a good answer. Which makes me wonder if I shouldn't take a design axe to the races. On the one hand, I like humanocentric games and regard race-bloat as a bad sign in Ye Auld Game. Scorpion Men have to stay, of course, because you gotta have Tharks. But it would be pretty darn easy to turn Desert Men and Wild Men into purely cultural categories and drop Helots in favour of the NPC Infra-Men (although that's always like a dare to see who's the first to want to make a PC out of them).

On the other hand, I know that other folks really like having those choices. And I kinda think I did a pretty good job on mine. Well, the Helots are pretty bland really. But I like the Desert Men a lot, I must say: copper-skinned, hairless, ectomorphs with nictating membranes. Hmn.

Still, I'd love to hear what any hypothetical readers think about this.

Places Under the Dying Sun: The Ruined City of Thanjivar

2010-09-09T19:32:00.000-04:00

Hex 16.01—The Ruined City of Thanjivar (1,000 XP when first entered)

Thanjivar is an ancient city; far older than Hajal (the dominant power in the Kahira region. It was once a mighty port that resisted the loss of the seas as best it could. The docks, and indeed other parts of the city, progress downward for some length as the city was extended over the centuries following the lowering waterline. Thus, the older parts of the city lie on what is now the Kahira Plain, while the newest parts reach nearly to the floor of the Valley of Mariners.

Thanjivar presents a tempting target for treasure-hunters of all kinds. Its the walls of the Old City are of a unique, pink marble that fetch high prices; unfortunately little is left of them after centuries of architectural pillaging. It is well-known (and possibly even true) that the ancient Kings of Thanjivar were ritually preserved after death by gilding; covered in a layer of pure gold that was then worked to resemble them perfectly. The Hall of Golden Kings is virtually a by-word for a fabulous treasure. Although no one has ever found the Hall, many other riches have been removed from the ruined city, whose people clearly enjoyed a high-level of material wealth.

As tempting a locale as Thanjivar is for fortune-hunters, it is no less a tempting site for spawning Scorpion Men. During the egg-laying season, bands of Akrab from the Lost Sea migrate into the Valley of Mariners and then ascend to the lower levels of the city to brood. During this time, the males will frequently raid out upon the Kahira Plain in search of food. More than one adventurer with dreams of gold has ended up as supper for a nest of young Scorpion broodlings.

Let's Roll Up A Heroes Character!

2010-09-01T20:08:00.001-04:00

I'm not even going to discuss how many times I've redone the Body Powers Table since I posted my corrected Take Three. Lord. I mean, improvement and all, but...lordy, lordy. Anyway, I'm so sick of revising that damn Table that I've decided to just roll up some characters today using the the whole Random Roll method as it currently stands, which is "not at all finalized". But who cares?

OK, here's the Table as it stands:

Just like the previous rounds, I've made 20 rolls of 2d6 at Invisible Castle. I'll use the results in order, dropping the second die if I only need to roll 1. So here we go.

I get 6 ranks of Powers. My first roll on Table 1 is 4:5, which gives me the Object Category. An Object can duplicate any other Power, so I roll again on Table 1, re-rolling if I get Object again. My re-roll is 6:2 which gives me the Sensory Category. So I have some kind of sensing device. Going to Table 7, I roll 1:2, giving me the Cosmic Awareness Power. Well, now, that's not something you usually see as coming from a device. Hmn, I'm thinking that this guy has some kind of amazing computer-thing that pulls information from the Cosmic Record (whatever that might be). Kind of a Kirby Mother Box. I've been fond of the Cosmic Awareness power since I first played Villains & Vigilantes (even though I never, ever rolled it). I give it Excellent +2.

My next roll is 6:5, putting me on the Intense Training Category. This gives me the Intense Training power to convert some number of Ranks in Powers into double that many Quality Ranks as I see fit. I'm going to give this Excellent +2, so that I get 4 Ranks in Qualities. The Mother Box idea has me thinking this guy may be from the future or a highly advanced alternate-world. I'll give him something like "Good +1 Cosmic Scientist" and "Remarkable +3 Hyper-Evolved Human".

I have 2 ranks left to go. My roll is 1:3, which is the Energy Power Category. A 2:6 gives me Exotic Energy. Oh man, that's too right. That Power requires me to roll on Table 9 to determine whether this is a focused Power (with 1 Effect) or a Meta-Power. The roll of 1:4 added is 5, so I get the focused version which is Energy Blast. Can you say "the Power Cosmic"? I think I'll give this power the Object Limitation, since this guy doesn't feel like a super-powered being to me. It could be some kind of blaster, but that doesn't feel suitably Kirbyesque. Instead, I give him a mace-thingy, crackling with dots, and call it "The Ion Rod". I only have 2 ranks left so it gets Excellent +2.

I could discard 1 Power and add those ranks to another Power, but I don't think I will.

I move on to Qualities, of which I get 10 Ranks. My first roll is 6:4, which gets me a Vehicle. I'm going to give him some kind of Air Chariot. I think I'll plug quite a few ranks into that. It can fly and maybe shoot out some kind of entangling thing. Gee, maybe even teleport. Anyway, I give it Incredible +4.

6 Ranks left. I get 3:4, which is Iconic Description. I love that one. Whatever my hero is called, his sub-title (if you will) is "The Ultimate Man!" (exclamation point included). I give this Remarkable +3. There's all sorts of times I can see that Quality being pertinent.

3 ranks left. I roll 1:2, a Motivation. With the Iconic Description in mind, the idea immediately occurs to me that my hero comes from a future where a hyper-evolved humanity allows itself to be destroyed somehow. Traveling to the past, my Motivation is "To Save Humanity From it's Own Worst Instincts". I'm not a crime-fighter per se, but someone who feels the need to inspire people to be their better selves. Let's give this one Good +1 Rank.

2 Ranks left and I get 1:5, which is Iconic Description. I don't see him as having another Iconic Description, so I drop this one and give the 2 ranks to my vehicle, bringing it up to Monstrous +6. This is one, sweet Air Chariot.

I get 1 Signature Stunt. I'll have him able to use the power blast from the Ion Rod as a defense; otherwise, the Ultimate Man is going to get splatted rather quickly against any super-scale attacks. It costs 1 Hero Point to do that.

I've pretty much already got my background already: last survivor from a doomed future, hurled back in time to prevent his own tragic reality from occurring. I need a good name now. Hmn. Let's just go ahead and lay the Kirby cards on the table and call him "Apocalypse, the Ultimate Man!". I even have the title of his debut story: "The Man Who Murdered Tomorrow!"

Name: Apocalypse

Other Names: The Ultimate Man!

Fight: 18

Qualities:

Hyper-Evolved Human (Remarkable)

Cosmic Scientist (Good)

"The Ultimate Man!" (Remarkable)

Motivation: To save Humanity from it's own, worst instincts

The Air Chariot (Monstrous Vehicle)

Powers:

Intense Training (Excellent)

The Cosmic Computer (Excellent Cosmic Awareness)

Ion Rod (Excellent Energy Blast)

- Ion Shield (Signature Stunt, Excellent Force Field, 1 HP)

Body Powers: Take Three

2010-08-31T19:00:00.000-04:00

Yeah, yeah: I posted just yesterday. And less than 20 minutes after saying I had a form I preferred, I found a bunch of problems. So, what the hell, here we go again:

On third thought, I felt that Claws are much more common than Poison and Acid Bodies. So I broke the first out as a separate power and combined the latter two. That got rid of the Body Weapon Power and Sub-Table. Fortunately, I also noticed that I had accidentally left in Size-Changing as a Power, even after I added Growth and Shrinking, so everything fits in the chart.

Body Powers: Take Two

2010-08-30T22:05:00.001-04:00

I posted Table 2: Body Powers some while ago. But I've never been satisfied with several aspects of that Table. I don't know why the dam broke today, but for some reason I got it to a form I prefer. The changes are actually pretty minor, but nothing is too minor for me to agonize over.

For those keeping score at home, what's changed?

I took out the Density Powers sub-table and broke out Density Increase and Intangibility into separate powers on the main Table. I think these powers are common enough that they rate individual entries.
Ditto for Size-Changing Powers into Growth and Shrinking for the same reasons.
And the same again for the Transform Self sub-table into Shape-shifting and Metamorph.
In the same action, the power Alternate Form was eliminated. It was so specific that I felt it didn't really deserve an entry. It can be duplicated by taking a Limitation on either Shape-Shifting or Metamorph to restrict them to one form.

Should you care about any of this? Probably not.

Quite Distracted By: One-Roll Combat (Again)

2010-08-26T19:13:00.000-04:00

Way back in April, I posted a thought for one-roll combat in Spellcraft & Swordplay; that is combining the attack roll and the damage roll. This idea was based on the serendipity that my hack for combat in S&S made the combat roll succeed on an 11+, so that the 1's digit would tell you how much damage was inflicted. I liked the idea and played with it a bit in a game, but didn't go much further. I got stuck on how to handle Weapon Size.

I have no idea why, but last night the brilliant Mark Krawec's suggestion to look at Over the Edge suddenly penetrated my brain. Seriously, why am I thinking about it all of the sudden? I have super-hero stuff to write. Hopefully, this is just a one-off "Quite Distracted By" and not a sign of my interest being redirected.

In any case, before I got out of bed, I came up with the following (which I have cast as part of Dying Sun rather than S&S proper)

COMBAT

Combat in Under the Dying Sun is slightly different than in the Spellcraft & Swordplay Revised Edition. As with the changes to Ability generation, these changes make greater use of the central 2D mechanic. The key difference is that degree of success matters in combat, with a successful roll being one that results in 11+ as always. A roll of “11” is 1 degree of success, “12” is 2 degrees of success, and so on.

To resolve combat:

1. The attacker makes his Combat Roll by throwing 2D

2. The Combat Roll is modified by:

a. Class-based modifier (see Advancement Tables for each Class)

b. Modifier from Weapon Class vs. defender’s Armour Class (see Melee Attack

Table or Missile Attack Table)

c. Defender’s Defense

3. Success results on 11+

a. On a roll of boxcars, roll 2D again, adding this result to the degree of success.

4. Damage equals 1 Hit Point per degree of success.

5. Damage is modified by:

a. First, multiply by Weapon Size multiplier (see Weapon Size)

b. Second, modifiers from Strength (in melee combat or hurled missiles)

c. Any other modifiers, such as from psychic weapons.

WEAPON SIZE

Each Weapon Size has a Damage Multiplier that is applied to the damage resulting from degree of success on the Combat Roll.

Tiny melee weapons would include stabbing someone with a paring knife or a stylus. Damage Multiplier is x1/2.

Small melee weapons include daggers, cesti, and fists. A small weapon can be used in the off-hand to parry, while using a Medium (or smaller) weapon in the on-hand to attack. This grants a +1 Defense to incoming melee at-tacks, but no Defense to missile attacks. However, anytime such a character scores a critical hit (12+), the Damage Multiplier for his regular weapon is increased by 1 as the character has managed to hit with both weapons. Damage Multiplier is x1.

Medium melee weapons include swords, hand axes, and maces. Damage Multiplier is x2.

Large melee weapons include great-swords, battle axes, mauls, and lances. They are unwieldy and impose a -1 to the Combat Roll. A character using a Large weapon cannot also use a shield (even Scorpion Men, due to tangling of limbs and tools). Damage Multiplier is x3.

Huge melee weapons cannot be used by player characters, but might be used by gigantic beings swinging tree trunks and the like. If used by a gigantic being, they are no more unwieldy than a normal man using a normal club. Damage Multiplier is x4.

Thoughts? Two things I am not at all decided upon

Should bonuses from STR and whatnot be added before the multiplier instead of after?
Should a boxcars result in adding just 1 more die of damage instead of 2?

Help Me With a Name (Again)

2010-08-23T21:58:00.000-04:00

Last time I did this, you were all very helpful. So let's try it again.

As discussed previously, two of the ways of looking at a Power are its Effect and its Category. At least right now, there are seven Effects:

Attack
Alteration
Control
Defense
Meta-Power
Motion
Quality

And there are nine Categories (which are mostly used for the Random Roll Tables):

Body Powers
Energy Powers
Matter Powers
Mental Powers
Movement Powers
Object Powers
Sensory Powers
Super-Qualities
Training

Can you guess what my question is?

Yes, I have a Motion Effect and a Movement Category. Isn't that confusing? I think so. So I turn again to my hypothetical readers for suggestions for changing one of them, hopefully to something that doesn't begin with an "M" (thus, "Motility" isn't that helpful).

Creating Powers in Heroes of Industry

2010-08-23T21:45:00.001-04:00

If you can describe a Power and decide upon its Effect, you should be able to create just about any power you need in Heroes of Industry. One of the most important things to keep in mind is how often or how easily the Power can be used in unusual ways. A Power that generally functions in one way is best represented as a Power with a single Effect, which can be occasionally expanded through Stunts (this is called a “Focused Power” in the Powers List below). A Power that has no single, usual function is better represented as a Meta-Power with several Effects through its Sub-Powers.

Notice that the above does not say “if it is flexible”. All super-powers are flexible in the comics; ingenious uses of one‘s power is one of the backbone of the genre. Thus it makes more sense to presume that all Powers will be used in unusual or less obvious ways. This is perhaps a bit counter-intuitive: the game-determined uses of a Power are just the baseline from which the players are expected work.

Does that mean that a player is “bad” if he can’t come up with lots of great stunts for his Powers? No, it doesn’t. But it does mean that this player is going to be doing a lot of the same over and over (“I blast him!”, “I blast him!”, “I blast him!”). Still, he can always make it up with snappy patter.

Sometimes, a Power would seem to have maybe two Effects; not enough to justify a Meta-Power, but enough to feel constrained by a single Effect. For example, consider a Power that allows the hero to turn his body into pure light so that he can fly and is also intangible. This is two different Effects (Motion and Alter for those keeping score at home). This seems tricky, but isn’t really. There are two simple ways to represent this kind of Power.

The first is using Signature Stunts. A Signature Stunt effectively adds an Effect to a Power at the cost of 1 Hero Point per use. Buy one of the Powers (Flight) and take a Signature Stunt to allow the other use (Intangibility). In this case, the player will have to decide if he has the ability to use the base Power without the other; if not, then he should take the Limitation “Cannot Use Without Activating Signature Stunt”. What does that accomplish? Well, it means that if the hero is out of Hero Points and therefore unable to use the Signature Stunt, he cannot use his Flight Power either. That sucks except that he will probably earn a Hero Point for having his Limitation come into effect. Getting screwed in order to come back and kick evil's ass is how the genre works.

The second option is even simpler. List the Power on the character sheet as one Power (“Body of Light”), but list both Flight and Intangibility beneath it. Mechanically, you have two Powers (which can even have differing Ranks if you like), but the Description is the same for both of them; that is, they are understood as being part of the same Power in the game world.