Swords & Wizardry Appreciation Day

So things have been quiet here at the Toolbox; a part of that is because I’m doing a lot of prep work for a thorough investigation of Pathfinder feats, but an even bigger part is boring “personal life” stuff, like a big move for work that I’m in the middle of.  Anyways, hopefully I’ll have interesting things to talk about here soon, but my “hobby time” has been pretty scarce lately.

But that’s for another time.  Today is Swords & Wizardry Appreciation Day!

So, Swords & Wizardry is one of many game systems that are indicative of the “Old School Renaissance  movement in tabletop RPG gaming. The idea is that RPGs these days aren’t like they were “back in the old days,” and that we’ve lost something in modern games that we had back then.  I generally agree with the notion, with the caveat that I don’t think modern games are bad, just different, and there’s value in reviving this older style of play.  S&W itself claims to be a “restated” version of the “Original Game” written by Gygax and Arneson in 1974.

In a lot of ways, I feel like Swords & Wizardry matches up a lot better with my assumptions about characters and the world than modern interpretations of Pathfinder and Dungeons & Dragons – not because those games don’t match my expectations, but because they are more-general systems that allow for a wider range of experiences, and Sword & Wizardry intentionally restricts itself to the grittier core of fantasy RPGing.

So, let’s look at some of what S&W does and how it does it, and I’ll throw my thoughts in as well.

Cooperative, GM-less, Fantasy Boardgame

I’m generally loathe to talk up products on this blog; it’s not really what I’m about, and it feels a little bit vulgar. That having been said, I spend a lot of time on Kickstarter backing various neat games, and this one at least feels like it might be pertinent to my readership. And since I’m already backing the already-successful project, any increased funding gets me more awesome stretch goals, and I like getting more awesome in my games.

The game is called Myth and it’s a cooperative-style dungeon-crawl type game.  Players choose a deck to represent their character’s class (Soldier, Archer, Acolyte, Apprentice, Brigand, Trickster, or Skald), and the cards represent actions and abilities that character can use to fight the monsters spawned by the board.  Killing monsters lets you get treasure, and treasure lets you kill more monsters! (We all know that formula.) The board is powered by The Darkness, which has it’s own deck of actions and rules for how the bad guys behave. One of the neat things is that The Darkness reacts to your play style, sending stronger challenges as you get more treasure and show off your moves, and punishing you for being too cautious. If you’re character is kicking ass and taking names, the monsters are likely to notice and gang up on you. The game is played in Stories which are comprised of three Acts which can be played successively or in separate gaming sessions, and each Act can take a couple of hours to play (so most gamers will probably play one Act per session, unless you’re a college kid during Finals – then you might do two or three Stories in a massive gaming binge… I miss college some times).

The project was successful at $40,000 and they’ve raised over $200k by this point; all of that means the game is getting more and more awesome as they’re able to add in new characters, villains, and features. They have stretch goals listed out to $400k and they claim they have even more tricks up their sleeves, but they’re down to just about a week before the Kickstarter ends. If it sounds like the sort of game you and/or your buddies might be in to, please go check it out and pledge for your copy.  If we reach $400k and get the multi-headed Ratling Boss I will be ever so grateful.

Play-By-Number

So I’ve been scouting around the Internet for dice stats since LS posted his “race-weighted attributes” post because work blocks me from Anydice.com but lets me wander around all sorts of message forums (and with two sick daughters at home, work is the most likely time I can do this sort of research). I found a link to an old (circa ’93) newsgroup post that lists probabilities and expected values for 3d6-drop-zero to 9d6-drop-six (they’re arranged by “drop lowest” but you can reverse the tables to get “drop highest”). That’s useful information for a number-crunching nerd likle me.

But in a couple places in the thread I found a meme that seems all-too-common in certain parts of the hobby, and I wanted to address that.  Specifically, it’s the notion that 3d6-roll-in-order or other systems that approach it are better because you’ll get low scores, and low scores “provide much color to a good ROLE-playing experience.” I submit to the reader that this is crap.

I’m not saying that all characters should have 12+ in every stat to be “worth” playing. I’m not saying that playing a character with some (or many) low stats can’t be fun. I’m not saying that stretching your horizons and playing out of type isn’t a good thing. But I am saying that the notion that playing a statistically-average or mathematically-likely character, especially one that is wholly or substantially generated randomly, is a better roleplaying experience is disingenuous at best.

At it’s core, role-playing has nothing to do with statistics. Role-playing is about taking on a persona and acting through scenarios, making decisions as though you were your character. We make a game out of it and attach mechanics so that you can understand and predict the likely outcomes of your decisions in a consistant way, but those are structures we build up around the core of role-playing.

The statistics are simply a way of describing our persona in a common language so that players and GM all understand the character and how he interacts with the environment. To say that a mathematically-likely character is better than any less-mathematically-likely character, we are first asserting that one persona is better than another for role-playing, and are then further asserting that it is better because of the randomness of it’s generation. Or, perhapse, it is better because it “forces” the player to “deal with” a flawed character. But why is that better, for role-playing? Can you not have just as-satisfying an experience role-playing as Superman as you can role-playing as Jimmy Olson?

Even if your character is stronger, faster, smarter, and better-looking thabn everyone else, there can still be interesting motivations, internal struggles, and decisions to be made, and that is what makes for good role-playing. Statistics say that my character is weak or clumbsy or stupid, and that’s one class of flaws, but it doesn’t say if he’s an alcoholic, a misogynist, bound by his word, or an extreme pacifist.  That’s another class of flaws. You can have an interesting, flawed character who’s stats are all 15+.

And here’s the crux of it: you can have an interesting time with a character who’s statistically perfect, but that wouldn’t be a terribly interesting character to me. I wouldn’t choose to play that character, much the same I wouldn’t choose to play a character who was randomly handicapped. I might choose to play a character with low INT or WIS or DEX, but the love-affair that gamers have with random generation has rarely made much sense to me. I have a couple theories:

It’s a game, and since it’s a game the notion of “fairness” comes in to play.  People want to know that they’re on even footing with their opponents, that no one is starting out with undue favor. But the problem here is two-fold – firstly your fellow players are not your ‘opponents’ (nor is your DM, if you’re “doing it right”), and secondly, how is random generation “fair,” exactly? It’s like the card game “We Didn’t Playtest This At All” where the rules not that star cards are simply better than other cards, and for game balance every player has an equal chance of drawing a star card. Rolling 3d6 is only “fair” in the sense that everyone has an even chance of rolling a superstar (or a dead-weight).

I suspect that another factor is that “that’s the way it was done” in the old days, and that’s the way it continued to be done out of tradition (and probably the above notion of fairness), and so people who played back then (or have adopted that mentality) had to live with bad rolls.  And occationally, having to live with sub-optimal results causes some people to rationalize and justify and find some reason to believe trhat sub-optimal is better, or at least not so bad. And from what I can tell, in old school rules attributes meant a lot less than the do in more-modern games. In Swords and Wizardry (ostensibly based off the 1974 rules), most stats are either +1, +0, or -1, so the swing between a “good” score and a “bad” score was minor. In 3.X, though, the swing is from +6 to -6 which is +/- 30% (a swing of 60%) on a d20! That is significant. Modern stats try to cover a larger range of variation, from vegitative 3s and retarted 6s to genius 14s and Ozimandian 18s. I suspect that all of old D&D’s 3-18 range covers just 7-14 in modern stats, because old D&D had a narrower focus.

My point is this: yeah, random-rolling characters makes things quick and ‘fair’ and can give you the ‘opportunity’ to play a character you might not have chosen for yourself. That’s fine and good and if it’s what you like, have at! But it isn’t going to fit everyone’s tastes, and please don’t act like it’s objectively better in any way. The core of role-playing doesn’t care about stats, except in that it’s how we describe our personas to the game. Hand-picking stats is just as valid, so long as everyone in the game agrees on what an accepitble character looks like.

Weighted Ability Rolls

So while I’m working on a couple of longer-term projects (discussing Pathfinder feats at-length; comparing D&D3.5 and Swords and Wizardry, demonstrating that the systems focus on different scopes; discussing healing in D&D, particularly in D&D 5) I wanted to point you over to a really cool idea from LS at Papers & Pencils.

He noted (as I did this weekend, breaking in my new Swords and Wizardry books) that the fist experience new players have of D&D is “”roll these dice, record the resulting sum. Repeat this task five more times, then assign one score to each of these six abilities, the functions of which you probably don’t fully understand yet,” and that’s a kind of sucky introduction to a Fantasy setting.  Instead he suggests describing the Races (dwarves are strong but clumbsy, elves are graceful but frail, gnomes are weak but charismatic) and then weighting attribute rolls by Race, with take-highest and take-lowest rolls replacing flat bonuses and penalties. I haven’t chewed on the numbers yet, but LS claims that 5-take-lowest averages a 7 and 5-take-highest averages a 14 (and 4-take-highst/lowest is probably about 8 and 12 respectively), so you get the benefit of the flat bonus but eliminate scores above 18 at level 1. And if nothing else, I think I really like that result.

So check out his post and then leave me your thoughts in the comments; I’ll probably make another post on this topic once I’ve had some time to look at the implications.

Hexographer Hex-ifies Anything

This one snuck past me, but catching up on the other blogs I follow I just learned from Trollsmyth that the Hexographer program just got a new feature that will convert any .png file into a hex map, making it easier to build RPG maps from any old map you find laying around the Internet.  This sounds like a GREAT feature, and I can’t wait to try it out: I’ve been very pleased with Hexographer so far, anyways.

What’s Wrong With Crafts

So I mentioned before that the Crafting rules in Pathfinder as essentially useless as-written. I went through the whole of it in my previous post, but here’s the cliff notes: success is practically guaronteed given time and materials (if you’re bad you’ll waste a lot of money on ruined materials), and how much time is inversely related to the DC of the item being crafted, so more difficult items take proportionally less time to craft than simpler items (of the same value).

That’s actually the only complaint I can really level squarely at the system, I think. I have a little bit of concern about impractical craft times (my calculations show a Master smithy taking upwards of 9 months to make a suit of plate armor, but I have no notion of how realistic that is) and the fact that there are several different systems for crafting common items, traps, magic items… But each of those things are mechanically different in the game as well, so having different mechanics for crafting them isn’t absurd of its face. I think I’ll need to address both of these, but it’s more a matter of argument and investigation, whereas my primary complaint is simply math.

Of course, the fly in that ointment is that it takes less time to craft a more-difficult item of the same price, and in general it looks like more-difficult items tend to cost more, so the otherwise-wonky math just offsets the escalation, so that it doesn’t take a hundred years to forge plate armor.

Here’s a comparable pair: hook hand (DC 12, 100 sp) and a short sword (dc 15, 100 sp). Assuming a Master of moderate talent we have a Take 10 score of 18 (10 base +1 attribute, +1 skill, +3 class skill, +3 skill focus). His weekly crafting score is 216 for the hook and 270 for the short sword; in each case it’s double-but-not-triple the target (100), so they each take a half-week to complete. Huh. That doesn’t tell us anything.

If instead of a Master we assume a craftsman of minimum capable skill, with a Take 10 of 12 and 15 respectively, the hook will score 144 for the week and the sword will score 225, so the hook is done in a week and the sword is done in a few days… but the sword was done by a better craftsman. But that same craftsman would score a 180 on the hook and take a full week!  Aha!

I’m… not sure what this proves. Maybe hooks are harder to make than swords? Maybe the abstraction is good enough, without getting into the minutia of every item’s form and composition?

One more.  A Dwarven Longaxe (DC 18, 500 sp) and a Greatsword (DC 15, 500 sp). Our Master would get a weekly score of 324 for the longaxe and 270 for the Greatsword, so it would take two weeks (648 and 640) to complete each. Again, doesn’t really tell us anything, I think.

So, here’s the question that I’m left with, given a flawed system that seems to work out alright in practice: why are we doing this?  What are we trying to accomplish? LS at Pencils and Papers was actually looking to change the Crafting skill, he said so deep in his first post on Crafting: “If characters are to be able to craft magic items using the crafting system (as is my goal)…”. As-written, D&D3.X/Pathfinder Crafting isn’t intended to create magic items, as those are covered by a Feat and a separate system that (if I recall) requires no roll. By declaring that Craft should allow players to create magical items and then declaring that Crafting is broken because you can’t find a hapy medium where Decent Characters and Focused Characters can co-exist, he’s kind of making his own problem. (Sorry for the slight, LS.)

Crafting in D&D is meant to model, to some rough level of “good enough”, mundane craftsmanship. A first level character with moderate talent and training can master all but the most difficult of crafts – Alchemy has DCs in the 20 to 25 range, but most other items top off at DC 18; a Master craftsman with a few apprentices (or high-quality tools) can Take 10 on a DC 26. I propose that it is mostly a tool for guaging the efficiency of NPC craftsmen – it’s deep enough that it can be applied to PCs because NPCs and PCs exist in the same world and abide by the same mechanics.

I think this comes down to a difference in philosophy: why have a skill in your game system if it’s only really meaningful to NPCs? One of the things like I like about D&D is that, for the most part, it is a complete system. That is, it can model the whole world. Others don’t like this, and there are game systems designed with minimal mechanics, or mechanics that only pertain to PCs, or rely on GM fiat to cover anything that the designers didn’t think was important. And although I think Craft (and other skills) are mainly intended for NPCs, that doesn’t mean they aren’t useful for PCs. It’s unlikely that a Player will have the time or opportunity to forge plate armor while on an adventure, but if the group uses downtime well (and I propose that all groups should use downtime, and use t often) he might have a few months to put some together. Will it be better than the magical gear he can find while adventuring? Probably not, unless the DM decides to fudge things the way LS intends to.  But is it a pointless endeavor? Again, no – it’s cheaper to forge your paladin a new suit of armor (if you have the time and talent) than to buy a new one, and it can be used (if you have the time and talent) to pad your coin purse a bit if you can find an interested buyer. It’s not directly related to dungeon crawling, but I propose that it doesn’t need to be, and it doesn’t even need to be directly related to PCs. The power of the D&D system is it’s completeness.

(As an end note: this isn’t where I expected to be when I started the post, but in investigating the actual application of the Craft rules I don’t think it’s as broken as I thought.  Wonky? Sure. Perfect? No way. But definitely meaningful and workable.)

On Crafting Skills

LS over at Paper and Pencils has been doing some great stuff at re-inspecting Pathfinder, much of which I’m still catching up on.  And seeing as last night was a “no sleep for daddy” night and this morning has been a “coffee weak as water” kind of morning, this probably isn’t the best time for me to try digging in to such a topic.  But I go where the spirit moves me!

Both LS and I agree that D&D/Pathfinder Crafting skills are pretty much useless as-written. We both think there should be a way to re-cast the crafting system so that it still works within the bounds of the Skill System (skill points, roll d20+bonuses against a DC to determine success or failure, etc). But LS and I are working off of a different set of assumptions; he wants to balance Crafting PC-to-PC (focusing on game balance and utility), and I’m interested in balancing PC-to-NPC (focusing on in-world modeling and meaning). I think LS and I had words over this difference of opinion before, but it’s mostly a matter of taste and interpretation.

LS draws up a table comparing a moderately-invested PC (we’ll call him Min) versus a heavily-invested PC (he’ll be Max), level for level. Min has a +2 attribute bonus, has the skill as a Class Skill (+3) and takes a point in the skill every level (+lvl); Max has a +5 in the attribute at level 1, adds to his attribute at every chance (+1 at 8 and 16), takes Skill Focus (+3 at Lvl 1, another +3 at Lvl 10), has the skill as a Class Skill (+3) and takes a point in the skill every level (+lvl). Right off the problem is clear, as Min has a score of 5+Lvl and Max has a score of 11+Lvl at Level 1, 12+Lvl at Level 8, 15+Lvl at Level 10, and 16+Lvl at Level 16. Max starts out essentially double Min’s effectiveness and has several hops in his progression where Min increases linearly. LS concludes that crafting can not be balanced, I conclude that we’re trying to balance the wrong thing.

Based on my assumptions, I think there are three characters to consider when determining how we should treat the skill: the Amature NPC (Al), the Professional NPC (Paul), and the Master NPC (Matt). Like most people in the world, they are all level 1 and do not advance. Al has an average attribute (+0) and no formal training (not a class skill), just what he’s able to pick up by doing (+1 skill point). Paul is talented (+1 attribute) and has been trained (+3 class skill) in addition to applying the skill (+1 skill point).  Matt is truly gifted (+2 attribute) and has been not only trained (+3) but focused on his craft (+3 Skill Focus) in addition to applying the skill (+1).  So we have three flat values that most of the world will conform to: +1 for Al, +4 for Paul, and +9 for Matt. With an assiatant (+2 help) and taking their time (Take 10), they can respectively hit DC 12, DC 16, and DC 21. Reaching beyond their skill (ie, rolling the die) gives them the chance to hit DC 22, DC 26, and DC 31, but risks ruining the whole effort.

Player characters will start out as an amature, professional, or master – possibly with some variation and potentially with much more raw talent (if the GM allows high ability scores). But unlike most of the rest of the world, PCs perform deeds that gain them Experience and raise their level, gradually becoming more than mundane. Higher level NPCs may exist, but just like PCs they are suitably Heroic, Mythic, Legendary, or God-like as well.

Masterwork items should have a DC of 20, so that a talented Master can create them reliably. The entirety of mundane crafting should be achievable within DC 30 or less, noting that these crafts are beyond the normal ability of a Master. Beyond that (and I might even say beyond DC 25) we enter the realm of crafting things that are more than mundane.

LS tosses out this notion, concluding from his treatment of Min and Max that there’s no good way to make the skill useful for Min without being broken by Max if item quality alone determines the DC. But this is because he’s comparing players to players in a competative sense, where as I’m comparing players to the world being modeled with the understanding (or even expectation) that players will quickly outshine all others. (That’s part of the point, isn’t it?) I also think that there’s a component of Skill bonuses that LS is neglecting – yes, it determines maximum range of the feats you’re able to pull off, but it also determines the complications that you can cope with and still be successful. Crafting an item without proper tools, in an unsuitable environment, or clandestinely (such as creating weapons in a jail cell without the guards catching on) might heap on a bunch of penalties, andit would take a suitably talented and skill individual to pull it off.

As-written the Crafting skill uses time, cost, and DC in an interconnected way that leads to non-intuitive results and/or absurd crafting times.  I’d like to address that, probably just by de-coupling the three of them.  But I’ll have to say that for another time.

On Meaningful Weapons

I’ve been thinking about weapons in RPGs lately.

At a fundamental level, how your game treats weapons says something about what’s important to the game. Some games have flat damage numbers so that all weapons do, say, d6 damage; in this system being armed or unarmed is more important than whether you have an axe or a sword. Other games have flat numbers based on class, so that a Fighter will do d12 damage and a Wizard does d4 damage regardless of what weapons they’re wielding; here it’s more important what role your character is playing as opposed to how you decide to fill that roll.

It’s also worth noting that where your game puts detail tends to be where your players will expect focus. This isn’t always true, especially if you have a regular group and everyone understands the intentions of the game and the group, but if you pick up random players for a game with a lot of nuance to the combat system don’t be surprised when they expect a lot of combat.

For my part, I like a system that differentiates between weapons and between wielders – that is, i want to see a system where there’s a meaningful difference between an Axe and a Sword, and a meaningful difference between someone who’s trained to use the weapon and someone who’s not. Dungeons and Dragons does the former pretty well. Almost too well, actually, when you consider that there are dozens upon dozens of different weapons with different properties (and feats!)… it actually gets to be a bit more complicated for my tastes.

Others have discussed what number is the right number to have meaningful selection without too much complexity, and I’m going to randomly pick 16 for my Fantasy games: dagger, staff, short sword, longsword, 1-handed axe, 1-handed hammer, 2-handed axe, 2-handed hammer, 2-handed sword, halberd/spear, whip, sling, crossbow, short bow, longbow, heavy crossbow. These are the weapons that came to mind off the top of my head, and I think that any weapon I’ve missed can be caste as one of these without losing a whole lot (the one exception being the spiked chain, I think…). Weapons can be differentiated by damage, critical multiplier, range, attack speed (ranged weapons need to be reloaded, maybe a dagger can attack as a Move action), how they fare against armor and resistances, and possibly bonuses they offer to the wielder (maybe to-hit bonuses, armor bonuses, etc).

The second piece is differentiating a trained wielder from an untrained wielder.  Originally D&D simply said certain classes *couldn’t* use certain weapons. I think a wise DM would read that as “certain classes can’t use certain weapons effectively, as weapons” because any slouch can swing a hunk of metal, but that doesn’t mean the results are going to be mechanically relevant. Later there was a penalty to hit for being non-proficient, and then a bonus to hit for being proficient, and that’s about the extent of it – training with a weapon affects how accurate your attacks are, and that’s it. If I had to do it on my own, I would probably make a trained wielder actually be more effective with the weapon, taking advantage of what the weapon allows, rather than an across-the-board bonus or penalty to accuracy. That adds a bit of complexity, I guess, but again it makes weapons meaningful: being proficient with a dagger is different from being proficient with a two-handed axe, and they lend themselves to different styles.

Under the cut I try my hand at a first draft of my 16 weapons.  What do you think about weapons, proficiency, and the complexity of making this stuff matter?

The Gaping Wound, Part 4

Death and Dying

We’ve established that the average person in D&D has 3 hit points. They can take 3 points of damage before they collapse from their wounds, and they can supper a total of 13 damage (10 more than their HP) before their body gives up and they are dead.  Up to -9 HP it is possible for them to stabilize and recover naturally. 

According to the SRD, a character who is dying (fewer than 0hp) has a 10% chance per turn to naturally stabilize, or else they lose another hp.  At this rate (and understanding a D&D Turn to be 10 minutes), most people will be dead within an hour and a half.  Even if they stabilize naturally, unless they have someone to aid them they will lose hp every hour until he becomes conscious (again, 10% chance per hour), and even then he will not begin healing naturally for some time (10% chance per day, or lose hp). If there’s someone around to help, the character stops losing hp and start healing naturally as soon as they stabilize — pro tip: always travel with a group.

Having established that hit points are real measures of actual injury, this becomes a model for the body’s ability to repair itself; it is litterally a measure of how close your character is to death, whether he’s being pummelled or just bleeding out.

Natural Healing

Natural healing in D&D 3.X is 1hp per day, per level — or 2hp per day per level if you get complete bed rest.  Generally, any fight you can walk away from you can recover from in a day or two; this is partly because a hp is roughly 1/13th of a character’s vitality, and because an injury does not need to be completely-healed to be mechanically-irrelevant.  Bruises, scratches, and the like are too small for the coarse-grained HP system to track, and day-old wounds appear to fall in the same category.

I have to admit that I’m surprised to read that an Nth-level character heals N times faster than other people; given three characters stabilized at -9hp, the 1st level character is on his feet in a week (6 days at 2hp/day), the 2nd level character is on his feet in a few days (3 days at 4hp/day), and the 3rd level character is on his feet in only a couple days (2 days at 6hp/day).  One way to explain it would be to say that a higher level character recovers quicker even if he doesn’t actually heal quicker, but that undermine’s my intent of “1hp means 1hp, a wound is a wound,” and I’d probably scrap the idea in my own games — characters heal 1hp per day regardless of level. (As an aside, actually healing quicker makes sense for a evel 5+ character, and below that level it might be easy enough to handwave the difference.)

Magical Healing

A major benefit of “hp is wounds,” in my opinion, is that it makes magical healing more reasonable.  This is more important than the quirks of natural healing because it’s concievable that a higher-level character actually does heal quicker, but more particularly because in most games natural healing doesn’t come up.  With access to Clerics and potions, most groups will take the time to refresh themselves to as close to full health as they can as often as they can.  Asserting that “hp is wounds” normalizes magical healing, so that it affects people the same way regardless of Class or Level.  A 1st Level Wizard and a 5th Level Fighter recieve the same, objective benefit from a potion of Cure Light Wounds, rather than having the Wizard’s sucking chest wound close up while the Fighter’s cuts and bruises just sting slightly less.

This also lets us talk objectively about the Cure spells and what they mean.  Cure Light Wounds does 1d8+1 points of healing, about 5 on average.  “Light” in this case is something of a misnomer, as 5hp is enough for most people to be dying.  Cure Moderate Wounds does 2d8+3, or 12 on average.  “Moderate” wounds are enough that most people would be on death’s door.  Cure Serious Wounds does 3d8+5, 18 on average; Serious wounds put a trained fighter into his grave.  Finally, Cure Critical Wounds does 4d8+7, or 44 on average.  That’s more than three mortal wounds for regular people.

Closing

I think that wraps up the notion of hit points as actual wounds.  By the book there are three factors to consider: how long you can fight (positive hit points), how long you can survive (negative hit points and death threshold), and how quickly you can recover (whether 1hp/day or 1hp/day/level).  Regular people can sustain 12 and 14 damage, with trained soldiers weathering as much as 17.  Higher level characters can fight longer and survive more serious wounds, and may recover from their injuries quicker.  A few points of damage are enough to put someone out of the fight (it’s a coarse-grained system), and 10-13 points of damage can be considered a mortal wound.  Scratches, superficial cuts and bruises, scars, and the like are too small to be tracked by hp, and the actual details of any given wound/attack are abstracted into the damage roll.  If you know what the wound is (ie, slitting someone’s throat), the hp system probably isn’t appropriate.

Part 3

The Gaping Wound, Part 3

Baseline

When my last post ended, we had established that there was a baseline in D&D that 14 to 20 points of damage is enough to kill a man, with 4 to 8 generally being enough to ‘drop’ him and cause him to start dying.  This is based off of die type and Constitution score and (importantly) assumes a Level 1 character.  That most people are Level 1 is one of my guiding principles, and I believe it will serve us well here.

Let’s take our notional baseline and put a finer point on it: the statistically average Level 1 Commoner (human, for what it’s worth).  His hit die type is a d6 and he has a 10 CON, so his (statistically average) hit points are 3 (rounding down) — he will begin dying after just a few points of damage and will be dead after a maximum of 13 damage.  A Warrior will, on average, have 5 hp and die after a total of 15 damage, making them a bit more resilient but still in the same ball park.  PC classes are comparable.  Extra points in CON effectively add 1.5 points to the total damage a character can take before death, so a tough Warrior might be able to survive up to 18 points of damage, but he’s still down after 6.

So far we can make sense of this.  Hit points represent the body’s ability to sustain damage.  After so much punishment, you will begin dying and, eventually, you body will beyond the point where it can recover; you are dead.  If you’ve been hurt and survived, rest and medical attention can, over time, return you to health.  Hit Points only measure the proximity to death; they do not track scars, broken bones, pulled tendons, torn muscles, etc. except in as far as those things bring a character closer to death.  Hit Points on their own can not tell you if you lose a limb, or an eye, or threw out your back.  Hit Points (on their own) can’t track bruises, fatigue, hunger, or exposure to the elements.  they just tell you how close you are to dying in a coarse-grained kind of way.  But for that, they do a pretty good job: some people are tougher than others, but everyone is effectively within a few points of each other (with the exception of extreme Constitution), and everyone heals at the same rate.

The real problem comes from scaling hit points with level and, perhaps to a greater extent, random hit points.

Scaling Hit Points

The way D&D does hit points is that you get X hit dice of type Y, where X is the level of your character.  So a Level 1 Commoner (on average) has 3hp, but once he hits level 2 he jumps up to 7 hp!  It’s worth noting here, though, that this isn’t really twice the vitality; he has 7hp, but he’s still dead at -10, so instead of dying after 13 damage he’s dead after 17.  It’s not a huge leap in those terms, but it does mean that he can take a lot more punishment before he ‘drops.’  What’s more, the average Level 2 Commoner can take more punishment than the average Level 1 Warrior, both before he drops and before he’s dead.  That is to say Level matters, which I think is appropriate.  The difference between Level 1 and Level 2 in many respects is more important than the difference between Warrior and Commoner; the Level 2 character is better than the Level 1 character fundamentally (though a Level 2 Commoner who says that to a Level 1 Warrior is unlikely to ever see Level 3).

Does this mean that the Level 2 character has more meat to them?  That their bones are stronger, that they’re more resistant to decapitation?  The answer is no: hit points don’t track those sorts of things, and if they’re important hit points are the wrong tool to use.  All it means is that the Level 2 character can keep fighting despite more severe punishment and that he can recover from graver wounds.  After 13 damage the Level 1 Commoner’s body can’t keep up and shuffles off this mortal coil; the Level 2 Commoner has taken the same punishment but is still holding on, and may yet recover.  The Level 2 character is more resilient.

At Level 3 the Commoner would have 10 hp and survive up to 20 damage before dying, and it starts to become clear that such a character can keep fighting despite having taken wounds that would drop a lesser man.  In fact, when the Level 3 Commoner has taken enough damage to drop, the Level 1 Commoner is on death’s door and fading fast.  The Level 3 character is truly heroic, though still within ‘normal’ bounds.  By the time he reach Level 5, though, he has 17 hit points and can sustain 27 points of damage before his last gasp; he fights on after receiving a wound that would kill other men outright.  He is on the verge of the superhuman.

Random Hit Points

But what if he’s not? This assumes that a character could increase in level without significantly increasing their resilience, but I don’t think that’s much of an assumption at all.  First, it’s easy to imagine a Wizard who becomes a better Wizard without becoming noticeably tougher.  Second, it’s already coded into the way we do hit points: statistically unlikely though it may be, that Level 5 Commoner could have only 7 hp (if he rolled ones for every Level after the first). And in terms of the purpose of the Hit Point system I think this flaw may be the worst because it does damage to the purpose of hit points: it divorces them from the character they’re meant to represent.

I think I get why we do it.  Dice are a thing that gamers love, they’re fair, and they help us determine otherwise uncertain things.  But my contention is that hit points are, in one sense, not uncertain.  The character either is or is not getting more resilient, and either by a lot or a little.  In a way, it’s as important as whether he’s a Wizard or a Warrior, a Gnome or a Half-Orc, Lawful or Chaotic.  It talks about his ability to act beyond his old limits; it is deliberate.  Determining this randomly causes problems because now anyone can suddenly be twice as resilient without a firm connection to the fiction; it’s random.

There’s not really a good ‘fix’ for this, and in many cases I’m not sure a fix is desired, but I think it’s important to recognize. If you don’t acknowledge that your character’s hit point increase is tied to the fiction then the mechanic is going to become divorced from the character’s reality.

Part 2
Part 4

The Gaping Wound, Part 2

It’s been about a month since I first opened the topic of hit points in D&D.  Although I still haven’t had the time to get in to the meat of it, I did want to look at a little bit of history of hit points.   That being said, I didn’t enter the hobby until the late ’90s, so none of my history lessons come first-hand.

In Chainmail, as near as I can tell, there was no notion of hit points; a unit was hit or not and, once hit the unit was dead.  There was apparently a set of rules made to model Civil War era ironclads (as noted by Roles, Rules, and Rolls), where the structure of a ship could take so much damage before being sunk.  According to the interview RR&R references, those rules were incorporated into D&D in order to ease the harshness of sudden, random death that Chainmail would have otherwise. This let D&D players act and feel like heroes.

Anecdotal evidence (the first comment, not the linked post) suggests that hit points for humans were originally set at 7, but player complaints lead to an increase.  Though, it seems like OD&D had starting hit points ranging from 1 to 7 (d6+CON), and 0 hit points was dead.  Then in AD&D, various hit dice were introduced based on class, with a range of 1 to 9 (depending on class and CON) for first level characters.  Again, evidence suggests these numbers were historically meant to represent regular people; the average joe.

So originally (for some value of “originally”) something around 4 points of damage were enough to kill a man (on average), but a burly fighter might be able to withstand twice that.  This is a rather coarse-grained system in that it can really only measure one quarter of a man’s vitality — anything less is too small to be measured.  This was alleviated a little bit with the addition of “below zero” rules, where a character was incapacitated (and dying) at 0hp, but they weren’t dead until -10 — it effectively takes 14 points of damage to kill the average man and 19 to kill a burly fighter, which is a much closer ratio than 4:9.  This addition makes the system a bit more granular and levels the playing field a bit (fighters are no longer taking two mortal wounds before they die). With 15 to 20 points of granularity (though, less than half of those count as “action-ready”), there’s a lot more room to address ‘lesser’ wounds, but we’re still talking about the sorts of things that are going to leave a mark and require a bit of time to recover from.  A busted lip is probably not hit point damage.

Hopefully it won’t take me another month to address ‘modern’ notions of hit points (I don’t think current systems stray too far from the historic baseline, at least not at first) and the contention that hit points are incoherent, that they are explained as “luck, divine favor, etc” but treated as actual physical wounds.

Part 1
Part 3

On Chases

Role, Rules, and Rolls posted a “Simple Chase Rule” a couple weeks ago, where a character can forgo their normal movement rate for a turn in order to roll for a random movement rate.  In D&D/Pathfinder terms, a character who moves 30′ in a round can move 10d6′ instead (or I guess you could simplify it to 6-spaces and 2d6-spaces if you cared to).  This gives a range of 10′ to 60′ (with an average of 35′) which is a huge range to represent bursts of speed or mishaps/stumbling.

Right off, I like the idea that Roger is going for here: with static movement rates, you can determine the results of a chase before anyone moves anywhere; the faster party wins, or in the case of matched rates whoever can outlast the other.  That’s rather dull, and adding in a roll shakes it up a bit.

That being said, I’m not sure it actually works, at least not in D&D and not with characters or groups who have different speeds.  For example, a human can move 30′ or average 35′ (at the risk of moving only 10′ in a turn).  A kobold can move 20′ or average 23′ (rolling 6d6+2), hoping to get as much as 38′ at the risk of only going 8′.  Assuming a Human is running from a Kobold and chooses to NOT random-roll the chase, he will move away at a steady 30′ pace.  If the kobold doesn’t random-roll the human will pull away at a relative 10′ per turn and the kobold has no chance to catch up.  If the kobold DOES random-roll, he will average a speed of 23′ and the human will pull away at a relative 7′ per turn, and the kobold has no chance to catch up.  Only early on, <i><b>if</b></i> the human and kobold are within 10′ of each other, does the kobold have a chance of catching the faster human, and then only if the koblod gets a particularly good roll and the human doesn’t put any special effort in to running.

Of course, this is all moot given that D&D/Pathfinder has a full-round “Run” action, where the character throws caution to the wind (granting combat advantage) and moves at a rate of 4x their normal speed (120′ instead of 30′).  Combining these would give something silly like 40d6′ (between 40′ and 240′ depending on the whims of the dice) and it breaks down from there.

Stealth and Wandering Monsters

A short little post while I chew on bigger problems.
Unofficial Games has a post up about using a stealth system to help determine the occurrence of Wandering Monster events.  It’s a neat idea and something that I already do in a loose way: ie, if the PCs do something noisy I have the world around them react, and in certain environments that reaction can be guards showing up to see what’s going on.  Zzarchov seems to imply that there’s a more-formal system he’s using that tracks “suspicion” points, and he doesn’t go into details of how the system works (except generally that noisy things generate suspicion and at some point that suspicion becomes an encounter).  It’s not clear if there’s a threshold, or if it works like old Mage: The Ascension Paradox in that the GM can choose to slowly “burn off” suspicion in smaller encounters or let it build up into something Big and Bad.

I think it would be interesting (and it’s again something I implement informally) to use a similar system to track whether the PCs become aware of wandering monsters, whether it’s a sneaking goblin raiding party or a lumbering ogre looking for a meal.  Not sure exactly how you could translate that to this “suspicion points” system — either you’re telling players “he’s gained enough points, you’re suspicious that there’s something just a couple passages away,” or you’re dropping hints each time the creature gains points and waiting for the players to decide they’re suspicious enough to check it out (“an innocuous sound?  The GM said it, it must be important!”).

Dungeons & Dragons Documentary

As a general rule I don’t intend to plug various Kickstarter (or IndieGoGo, or whatever) projects on my blog; that’s not what the Toolbox is about.  But I wanted to mention this one because, whether you love it or hate it, I feel like D&D is a piece of our cultural heritage as Role-Players.  If you can support the project, I encourage you to do so.

System Doesn’t Matter

(Except When It Does)

So a little bit ago I listed a few topics I was planning on addressing when life gave me a break.  Instead of giving me a break I got a nasty head cold which has killed my productivity.  I’ve taken that as a sign from The Universe that “this ain’t going to get easy anytime soon,” so I’ll just have to press on.

At the end of that list (which wasn’t written in any particular order) was a statement about how more and more I’m of the opinion that, in role-playing, the system doesn’t matter.  I waffled on that a little bit — after all, if system doesn’t matter then why do we have D&D and GURPS and Savage Worlds and World of Darkness and RIFTS and ad nausiem — but I think I’ve come back around and decided that System Doesn’t Matter (Except When It Does).  Let me see if I can explain myself in a meaningful way.

D&D Next Packet v0.2

So while I was away the world changed, and we suddenly have a new D&D Next Playtest Packet.  I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet, but lots of other people have: once I’ve worked my way through it I’ll add my thoughts to the conversation and probably try to run another playtest (I’m particularly interested to see if my players take to the character creation system or not).  Apparently, this process is expected to continue for 2 years.

In the mean time, there’s a summary of changes included in the packet and I thought I’d share my initial impressions on that.

Changes

Hit Points: everyone, both players and monsters, have lower hit points.  I’d have to look at what exactly this means, but I think it may be a good thing.  (Though, I’d have to finish my investigation of What Hit Points Mean before I can really say.)

Surprise: rather than changing your initiative (-20 to your roll), Surprise now just prevents you from acting at the beginning of combat (essentially just like always).  This is probably a net-positive, but I really liked the penalty-to-roll mechanic.

Opportunity Attacks: exist again, but only trigger if you leave a character’s reach.  I think this gives characters more maneuverability around Giants than around Orcs, but I’d have to check. They also added a disengage action, so you can run away without provoking an attack.

Ranged Attack in Melee: rule only applies to ranged weapons, not spells.  I’d have to refresh myself on what the rule was to be sure of what this means, but again I think it’s probably good.

Short Rest: can be taken even if you have fewer than 1 HP left.  Not sure if that really changes the dynamic or not; apparently it lets a henchman use a healing kit on you, which seems reasonable.

Long Rest Variants: They say they haven’t changed the rule, but they’ve added variants to try out.  I’m tentatively intrigued.

Conditions: Some conditions were altered; I don’t remember having a problem with any conditions before.

Armor and Weapons: the tables have apparently been heavily revised, which is good because they needed it.  Medium Armor no longer penalizes Move Silently.  Don’t know what I think of that one.

Monsters: New stat block format, new abilities, and an XP-based encounter-building system.

Spells: Changed spell disruption rules (now not just Wizard-specific), clarified what you need to cast (your voice and a free hand), and added and revised spells.

Classes: Changed Cleric’s Turn undead and Channel Divinity.  Added combat superiority and fighting style for Fighters.  Changed Rogue’s Sneak Attack and Skill Mastery.  Too vague to really comment on at this level.

Misc: added a skill list (yay), associated skills with attributes (boo), changed the word “Theme” to “Specialty” (huh), and changed some feats.

Oh, by the way…

Did I mention that none of this matters any more?  OK, that might be a little bit of an exageration (for some of you), but WotC also announced that they’ll be releasing their “whole back catalog” of D&D products in electronic format.  I’m not sure what that means, either in terms of what exactly will be available and in exactly what form, but if it means I can hand them a reasonable amount of money and get all those 2nd Ed. treasures I apparently missed out on, color me excited.

On Cheating

There are a few people around who have recently made posts about cheating in RPGs — so I’m going to reference a post from three years ago on the same subject.  I think the old post addresses the topic better, and the same ideas can be applied to the newer posts.

Anyways, the post attempts to break down who cheats, how they cheat, and why they cheat.  To save you from reading a years-dead post and comment thread, here’s the gist of it:

• GMs cheat because it saves players from failure, or makes things more cinematic, or lets the story continue as it ought. This is both right and just, and GMs should feel free to do just so. Players can’t do anything about it and just have to trust that the GM is making the game better.
• Players sometimes ‘cheat’ because they make honest mistakes, or they’re bad at math.  These are harmless and probably don’t mean much in the long run.
• Bad players sometimes intentionally cheat, lying about die rolls, re-using expended powers, and intentionally applying bad math. If caught, they probably won’t do it again.
• Very bad players go so far as to doctor their dice or have variant ‘builds’ of their character available so they can address niche situations better. These guys cheat maliciously and will probably keep cheating until there’s an uncomfortable confrontation.
• The best solution to cheating is to not directly punish the offender, but passively punish them by rewarding everyone else.

I have a number of problems with this post.

GMs Cheat and That’s OK

I’m going to go ahead and say that it is in fact not OK for the GM to cheat.

Think of it this way: you’re at a football game, and the visitor team is up by 6 points.  The home team gets the ball and carries it down the field, eventually getting a touchdown.  The refs throw a flag and call the ball dead at the 2 yard line, not because the ball was dead, but because it makes for a more exciting game if that happened.  Then the team plays again and gets a touchdown; they go for the kick but it hits the upright and bounces away.  Now the refs call it and say that hitting the upright was ‘good enough’ for the extra point and the home team wins by 1 point.  What an exciting victory!

Except that it’s not; it’s not exciting and it’s not a victory, because it didn’t really happen.  Sure it’s a cool story, but it’s just a story that the refs are telling and it has nothing to do with the team’s actual effort or performance.  And it’s not really a victory because the team didn’t really overcome any obstacles (the refs just declared that they’d done so) and it had nothing to do with their play anyways: the refs knew what they wanted the outcome to be and orchestrated things so that’s how it happened.  In a way, the teams were irrelevant.

This is what it’s like when a DM cheats.  He can do it easier than any other player in the game because his role is to portray the entire world, and he can justify it by saying “this makes a better story” or “this makes it more fun.”  But the cheating player can make the same justifications for why his cheats are OK, too, and now we’re back in 3rd grade yelling “bang, I shot you!” and “no, you missed!”  Lawlessness and chaos.

A GM, like a referee, should be impartial to either the success of or methods used by the payers to engage the situations he’s presented them with.  If he’s not, if he’s always there to pull their fat from the proverbial fire, eventually they’re going to recognize that what they actually do is irrelevant — the story will progress essentially the way the GM decides it will.  And depending on how egregious the GM is about cheating in the name of “fun,” the player’s whole character might well be irrelevant — he’ll catch the ledge or not, hit the target or not, persuade the duke or not based on what the GM has decided, and nothing more. In large doses this is absurd, but it’s frustrating even in small doses.

Players Cheat and Should Be Punished In-Game

Sometimes players cheat.  I would hope that it’s always accidental but sometimes it’s not and we need to know how to deal with that.  Here’s my solution: don’t play with cheaters.

You don’t always know up-front that they’re a cheater and you should probably give them the benefit of the doubt — take them aside after the game and confront them directly about their cheating and how it’s unacceptable.  If that fixes things, great; it never needs to be brought up again.  If it doesn’t fix things, politely ask them to leave; and by “politely ask them to leave” I mean “tell them in clear terms that they are no longer welcome to play in your game.”  Done.

What you shouldn’t do is punish them in-game for cheating.  That’s passive-aggressive and kind of a dick move, especially if you haven’t explained to them what you’re doing and why.  It might ‘fix’ the problem, but it’s childish and demonstrates that you aren’t an unbiased GM.  If you punish cheaters in-game, now they’re going to wonder if you punish them in-game for other out-of-game reasons, like favoring the wrong sports team, having excessive body odor, or eating the last piece of pizza.  Even if none of that’s true you’ve eroded their trust in you, and that’s not going to be good for the game in the long run.

Why Are We Cheating Anyways?

I have no idea why cheating is even a factor.  If you’re sitting around a table with your friends pretending to be dwarves and wizards, what exactly are you gaining by cheating?

Why Random-Role Gender?

Sarah Darkmagic has an interesting post up about why random rolling for gender is a good thing for the hobby.  She makes some interesting points which (I hope I don’t butcher this) basically boil down to: most gamers are men, most gamers aren’t into gender-bending, random-rolling for gender would produce more female characters and force us, as a community, to consider female-oriented stories as much as male-oriented stories.

She’s commenting on a tweet from @PelgranePress that said “RPG idea: define your character. Last thing – roll for character’s gender.”  For my part, I think Pelgrade’s idea is kind of great, but Sarah’s strikes me as more than a little abrasive.  Let me explain:

Pelgrade’s idea is essentially to build an entire character and then determine randomly whether your character is male or female.  I think that this is a pretty great idea because I regularly hear gamers saying, “I don’t know how to play a female character” (or, less commonly, the opposite).  And my thought is that, for the most part, if you’re trying to think of “what would a girl do in this situation” rather than “what would a person do in this situation,” you’re already coming at it from the wrong angle.  Yes, there are practical considerations to take in terms of the upbringing and personality that men and women might have in the setting of your game.  And it’s probably that women are going to feel threatened in situations where a man might not, and so on.  But in general, I think that once the personality and upbringing of your character is determined, whether they’re male of female has a rather small impact in playing them.  Pelgrade’s idea, from my perspective, ensures that you build your character as a full person rather than focusing on one (obvious) piece of the whole.

Sarah’s point though strikes me as abrasive for (I imagine) the exact reason that she thinks it’s a good idea: it would force people to play as women.  This bothers me for the same reason I don’t want a random roll to determine my character’s race, class, or attributes: maybe I don’t want to play a dunce wizard.  Maybe I don’t want to play a brawny dwarf.  And maybe I don’t want to play as a woman.  Not because there’s anything wrong with any of those, and it doesn’t mean I’ll never play one, but simply because I want to choose the I want to portray.  I don’t want to pick a role out of a hat.  One of Sarah’s basic premises is that most gamers are men and most aren’t comfortable with gender-bending — so the solution is to force them to gender-bend?  That sounds like a wonderful way to turn off a large segment of the community.

I have no problem with women gamers, and I have no problem with female characters.  I regularly gender-bend, and some of my favorite characters etc., etc.  But it’s because I chose to play a female character because there was something compelling that I latched on to.  It may be one thing to encourage game designers and module authors to consider female-oriented stories when they put pen to paper, but forcing players into roles they don’t want or aren’t comfortable with sounds like a bad idea.  Sarah’s comments are a great thing for The Industry to take note of and improve the overall availability of and support for female-oriented play, but it shouldn’t be forced on any given gaming group.

Stuttering

I’ve got a few different irons in the fire right now, maybe a half-dozen half-started posts.  Real Life — the stuff I do between thinking about and playing RPGs — has been more intense than usual lately, and that’s put a real drain on my energy.  So we end up with half-posts like this.

Some things I’ve been thinking about:

• Initiative, and the flow of combat in general, is kind of wonky in most games.  I want a system that rewards a character for a high Initiative bonus as well as rewarding characters for a high Initiative score.  Some games do one or the other, but I’m not sure anyone does both. (Dr. Gentleman has a series of posts about combat that may cover some similar ground, or not; I haven’t read them yet.)
• I want to get back to thinking about Hit Points in D&D 3.X; my first post was really just a preliminary introduction, and I haven’t gotten around to the real meat of hit points.
• I don’t like the way Magic is split in D&D, or the way Class Spell Lists are broken up; but I haven’t thought hard enough about it yet to be sure that changing it won’t make ever caster just a Wizard with a funny(er) hat.
• I’m intrigued by what I’m hearing about running RPGs through Google+ — my first gaming group (my brothers) is spread out over several states now, and the potential for running a game with them again is very attractive.  I may finally get a chance to play RIFTS.
• More and more (and more) I get the feeling that system doesn’t matter, because the core of role-playing is making choices, and mechanics are just ways to arbitrate consequences.  A system is necessary, but does it really matter what system?  It seems lots of people answer that with an emphatic “yes!” and I need to do more research on that. Minutes after writing this I already feel the lie in it; I have to confess that system does matter, but I haven’t unpacked that concept enough to say how, when, or why it matters — that’s what I want to do research to understand.

Once life lets up on me a bit, I plan to address some or all of those thoughts.

Divine Magic

Although he takes it in a different direction than I would, Seth over at Kobold Enterprises touched on an idea I’ve been mulling over a little bit when he posted about recasting Divine Domains as “schools” of magic, the way arcanists have transmutation or divination.  He wants to set up pre-made spell lists and boils the domains down to a core of 8, which isn’t really the sort of thing I’m interested in.

Rather, what struck me about divine magic was this: Clerics (and Paldins, etc.) are tied to a given god (or allegedly a pantheon or idea, though I’ve never seen a good explanation on how that should be implemented).  They must be within one step of their diety’s alignment (a LG god can have LG, LN, and NG clerics, etc).  Depending on alignment (on the Good/Evil axis), they can Channel either positive or negative energy, and spontaneously cast either Cure or Inflict spells.  What this means is that a Priest of Zeus, a Priest of Hades, a Priest of Poseidon, and a Priest of Kronos all look exactly alike, with the possibility of a small variation based on good/evil.  It doesn’t matter that Zeus commands weather, Hades death, Poseidon the seas, and Kronos time — each cleric has access to the same spells (Bless, Compel Hostility, Cause Fear, Detect Undead, Enthrall, Raise Dead, etc).

I would like to recast (or maybe ‘fracture’) the Cleric Spell List so that Clerics only gain access to spells that are relevant to their deity’s domains.  Divine Spells are already marked with arcanist-style schools, and that might be a good place to start, but gods deal in domains, not schools, and a God of Love and a God of Deceit may both have Enchantment spells but probably shouldn’t have the same spells.

I think there may be some common core, spells that are iconic for the class (Cleric vs Paladin vs etc.) but I’m not entirely sure of that (it’s easier to concieve of spells that match all paladins than ones that match all clerics, I think).

RPG Blog Carnival – What’s In Your Backpack?

Each month the folks from the RPG Blogger Network organize an RPG Blogger Carnival, where a bunch of bloggers all tackle the same question or topic.  This month Game Knight Review is hosting, and the question is “what’s in your backpack?”  The Gassy Gnoll kept the question pretty open — your real world backpack, you’re in-game backpack, whatever — so since this blog is supposed to be about GM tools and game structures I thought I might whip something up about what’s in my “backpack” for running a campaign.

I strongly feel like the most important piece of gear is a hex-map; this may be less true if you’re running a game that takes place entirely inside a megadungeon, or if overland travel is specifically unimportant and hand-waved (as might be the case in any reasonably-civilized setting), but hex maps seem to have been a key component of the game originally and it’s the biggest “missing piece” in modern games if you ask me.  Lots of people have lots of ideas about what makes a good hex map, but I’m going to go ahead and say that it should consist of 6-mile hexes (this makes some of the math a bit easier) and have a moderate-to-high amount of keyed locations (something between 80% and 100% coverage).  These keyed locations can be used to mark settlements, monster lairs, dungeons, etc and can be used to inform “random encounters.” (The Alexandrian has a long-running series discussing his complete hex-crawl system.)

The second bit of gear should be a random encounter mechanism, and you should have one whether the party is in a dungeon, in the wilderness, or even in a city (though that last might be a bit of a stretch). Random encounters give your world a sense of being “alive” and functioning even when the PCs aren’t around.  There are lots of ways to do this; I haven’t had time to use them to great extent, but my favorites are probably the one-page encounters method or more standard, region-based tables.  I think it’s important to note that these don’t all have to be combat encounters (I’d argue they shouldn’t all be combat) but one of the tings that random encounters ward against is the 15-minute work day (because going nova on an early encounter leaves you vulnerable to a random encounter later, and being vulnerable could mean death).

The last piece that I think is essential (and Gygax agrees with me, apparently) is a solid notion of time. Modern games still keep time during combat, and in general people keep track of days (at least in vague terms of night and day), but without the right granularity of time it becomes difficult to keep track of what might be going on “off-screen” and how long it takes your players to accomplish certain tasks — it’s possible that you can get by without a solid notion of time, just as characters can probably get by without flint and tinder, but I think you’re making it harder on yourself.  For me, I use the following:

1 Combat Round = 6 Seconds
10 Combat Rounds = 1 minute
1 simple non-combat action = 1 minute
10 minutes = 1 turn
6 turns = 1 hour
4 hours = 1 watch
6 watches = 1 day
7 days = 1 week
4 weeks = 1 month
13 months = 1 year

Most other tools I’ve found to be essential so far tend to come standard with modern games: things like a combat system, a notion of healing and damage, systems for skill-based action resolution.  A mechanism for adding or tracking weather in your world can add flavor, too; Gnome Stew has a system based on a Dragon article that’s “good enough for fantasy.” I’d recommend finding a system for NPC morale, but I haven’t gotten around to finding a good one yet. And I think there’s a lot to be said in favor of published modules, especially encapsulated ones that can be plopped into any campaign, either for filling out your hex key or presenting to your players when you’ve had a bad week for prep.

What do you think?  Anything I’m still missing from my pack?

Why I Hate 4th Edition

So right off, no, I don’t hate 4th Edition; the title’s a cheap trick to grab your attention.

I do have some major problems with 4th Edition, though; that’s why I’ve effectively left it behind in favor of 3.X and Pathfinder (and if my books ever ship from Amazon, I’ll see about this 1E thing).  But when I left 4E I didn’t really have the concepts to describe why I was dissatisfied by the game, and I haven’t taken time to really consider it since my vocabulary expanded.  I’d like to try to address that now.  This is mostly just me talking through some thoughts.

I think the biggest turn-off for me is the notion that 4E has a very “game first” mentality.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing for a rules system to be, but it’s the difference between “I want to cast a fireball” and “I want to do d8 damage over 9 spaces.”  4E seems to focus almost exclusively on tactical combat which I feel makes it come across more as a tactical miniatures game than a Role Playing Game — you can role play around a minis game, but you can also role play around a game of chess; that doesn’t make it a Role Playing Game.

My biggest complaint, I think, is that the Powers system feels flatly detrimental to my notion of role playing.  The limitations and choices that I’m presented as a player in 4E often times don’t make sense as limitations or choices for my character, and that makes it difficult to  get into my character’s head.  The Essentials line came out after I left, but I do get the impression that they’d be less offensive to me (they seem to generally ignore the Power system and function more like 3.X characters); it would probably be worth my time to look in to them.

My second biggest complaint is about Healing, or more to the point the fact that there’s little sense of lasting repercussions from battle.  This makes sense if the game is meant to be just a string of combat encounters (if you can no longer fight, the game’s over), but I don’t want my game to be (essentially) all about combat, and the lack of consequences offends my goals for role playing (make choices, experience consequences).  I’m OK with the “HP = Morale” notion that 4E seems to run with, I just want something more than “you’re out a couple Healing Surges for the day” if the players get in a fight they can’t handle.  I think part of this come from my desire to not have combat be the “first and best” option in every situation; maybe 4E works better if I try playing a more combat-toned game; I don’t know, and I’m not sure how much I care to fit my desires to the needs of the game (rather than fitting the game to my desires).

My final complaint is on how poorly executed skills in 4E seem to be.  The whole Skill Challenge mechanic seems like a good idea at first, but the way it’s described and the guidelines given for building a Skill Challenge feel railroad-y and forced.  The rules seem to imply that the Barbarian has to participate in political negotiations (if it’s a Skill Challenge) even though he has no interest or ability in that sort of thing.  And I’m supposed to design challenges so that there are X primary skills and Y secondary skills, and it’s all mechanics-first and the actions of the characters aren’t important so much as which attribute is being rolled.  Add in the terrible math that 4E shipped with and the repeated revisions after the fact, and I lose all confidence in the mechanic. (I also feel like they collapsed too many skills together, the one’s they’re left with are too broad, and not enough ‘regular activity’ is covered in the skill system, but those are relatively minor points, all things considered).

My wife likes 4E, though (now we all understand my true motivation here); she thought it was a lot more approachable than the other games I have on my shelf, and to be fair it is.  My wife grew up on Monopoly and Sorry!, and didn’t experience anything like the games I play before we met.  4E is a lot more like a board game.  I don’t think that’s a shining recommendation for it, but if my wife wants to play 4E, it’s in my interest (as a wise husband) to find a way that I can play 4E with her. I started thinking about a fix for the Powers system a while back, but after I started looking at it in more detail it occurred to me that there’s the potential for abuse because the game doesn’t expect powers to be interchangeable.  I haven’t really thought about it much since then, so I’m really still in the same spot.

I Have Met The Enemy

There’s a post up at the Transitive Property of Gaming blog about how the author had a really great idea for a homebrew zombie apocalypse game, and how it didn’t go at all how he planned.  I want to reiterate how awesome this homebrew idea sounds: he has a whole apartment complex and neighborhood that he was personally familiar with, he made up maps of the floor plans, rules for improvised barricades, a flowchart for zombie behaviors, a timeline for how bad the infestation is from one block to the next, systems to encourage foraging outside the fortress — some really cool ideas.

The problem is that from session one the players decided that staying put was a bad idea, and so made it their goal to escape the city.  They knew, as we all do, that most “successful” zombie movies are the ones where the characters escape the populated areas, and movies where characters whole up end with the social unit collapsing and people turning on each other.  But that situation, the one where the characters have to deal with the break down of social bonds, is obviously the game the author wanted to play.  Instead, he had to toss out a bunch of his prep and resorted to believable roadblocks like a military quarantine and making the easiest path be the one that lead back to the fortress — but the players just interpreted this as the requisite obstacles that needed to be overcome.  They thought *that* was the game, rather than the GM’s attempt to get them back to the game.

I wasn’t at this particular game, so I can’t say how well things were communicated or not, but I can say that I’ve seen this happen over and over and over again, in games I’ve played in and games I’ve run.  There seems to be this unspoken rule that GMs aren’t allowed to tell their players what kind of game they (the GM) want to play, which is kind of silly when you consider the amount of effort those same GMs end up putting in to guide/railroad the players back to where they “should” be, back to The Plot.  Back to the Game.

It should be a pretty simple fix: just tell your players before you start before Character creation or anything) what kind of game you want to play.  The GM is as much a player as anyone else at the table, and you deserve to have your fun as much as the next guy.  For most of us, this is a hobby and we shouldn’t treat it like a job.  You aren’t their to entertain an audience, you’re there to play a game with your friends.

“I want to play a game where your characters barricade their apartment building against the zombie hordes and have to deal with each other in the resulting stressful environment.”

“I want to play a game where your characters are professional adventurers who delve into ruins and make a living selling ancient treasures they find.”

“I want to play a game where your characters are small-town folk who are thrust into adventuring when your town is destroyed.”

“I want to play a game where your characters are non-combatants who travel cross-country to reclaim their fallen kingdom from an ancient dragon.”

I’d say that adding “and if you fail you will likely die” to any of those is probably healthy, too, but your mileage may vary.

My only observation is that as GMs we feel like we need to cajole our players into the game, that what they want is more important than what we want, because without players there is no game.  Or because we want to play a game with *those* friends, specifically.  Or some other situation where compromising our fun seems to be the best or only way.  Maybe this post says more about my experiences than any wider phenomenon in the hobby, I don’t know. And while I don’t think the GM should give away all his secrets and twists, I think we’d all be better off if we stopped playing “guess the plot.”

The Gaping Wound, Part 1

In my current estimation, Hit Points are the greatest single failing for Dungeons and Dragons.

That’s maybe a strong statement to start this off with. Hit points serve a vital (heh) role in Dungeons and Dragons, or really any system that has violent conflict as a key component and chooses to use them.  When our characters take damage in-game, they feel pain.  Presumably they also suffer wounds, and generally can tell when The Reaper looms near.  As players, we don’t have that same visceral connection, and Hit Points are one way to address the disconnect.  It answers the question, “how close am I to death?”

I think there are a number of complaints that can be levied against any system that tries to answer that question.  How aware are we of our own vitality? How much information should a player have about the wounds they’ve suffered?  What’s too much information, and what’s too little? I don’t think Hit Points are a perfect solution, or necessarily the right solution for everyone, but I do think they can be a “good enough” solution, and I think that character’s vitality is an important enough component that erring on the side of “too much information” is excusable.

Not all hit point systems are treated equally.  World of Darkness uses a Hit Point system where characters generally have between 6 and 10 Hit Points, where a single attack can do massive amounts of damage (one good shot is likely to kill mortal characters), and the effects and recovery vary based on the type of damage inflicted.  Palladium has a kind of “hybrid” hit point system, with vital HP wrapped in a sheath of “SDC” points that emulate toughness.  SDC represents superficial harm and heals quickly, HP represents serious wounds and heals slowly.  WoD hit points are essentially static, and there are penalties levied to actions if the character has suffered severe injury; systems like Palladium and D&D increase hit points through leveling, and don’t levy penalties for taking damage.

The Complaints

Most recently the topic of hit points in D&D came up with Dr. Gentleman, who has a post on the topic at his blog.  In his post, I believe he makes four claims:

1. Hit Point systems lead to Nickle & Dime combat — hit him more than he hits you.
2. This is unrealistic — real injury comes from properly applied force, not repeated lesser trauma, and an attack that fails to kill a character outright won’t kill him with repeated application.
3. Strike placement is generally not considered in these systems — at best, a called-shot gives a bonus to damage.
4. Hit Point systems are too abstract — what does “5 damage” mean? Especially if a character’s hit points increase?

My intent here isn’t to spar with Dr. Gentleman; I think he makes some valid points.  I’m using his article merely as a convenient framework to organize my thoughts.  In general, though, I think his points either confuse design of the system with implementation of the system (some DMs apply or describe the system poorly) or miss the point of the system (to give a player feedback that mirror’s his character’s experience) or actually criticize some other (possibly related) mechanics (such as damage or healing).  The major point, though, and the one that encapsulates where I feel D&D fails is Point 4 — what is the relationship between damage, healing, hit points, and my character?

Minor Points

For Point 1, I think it’s important to recognize what’s going on in the system.  Hit Points measure how close the character is to death.  If your goal is to kill your opponent, then reducing their Hit Points to 0 before he does the same to you is the goal; at the most basic level this is going to be “hit him more than he hits you,” but that’s something of a straw-man — the same can be said of actual combat.  The actual complaint is that Hit Points don’t model any kind of alternate goal, but you might as well say that a barometer can’t tell you how hot it is outside.  Point 1 is looking for a different tool, perhaps a system for tracking injuries, and Hit points neither precludes nor is diminished by the use of such an additional system.  (There are a number of such systems out there, and I hope to address some in a future post, since it can be a useful tool in the right situations.)

Point 2 strikes me as simply false.  That is, yes, properly applied force does cause real injury, but so can repeated lesser trauma.  Punching a man in the face will hurt but rarely kill him outright; a sustained beating is likely to lead to severe injury and death, and while that’s occasionally due to a single critical strike, it can also be because our bodies aren’t designed to sustain repeated trauma.  Bones break, vessels burst, all sorts of things result from otherwise-minor trauma applied successively.  That being said, this point begins to hint at a larger issue, one I believe is about assumptions and expectations. How many paper-cuts does it take to kill someone?  The answer depends on how much hit point damage a paper cut deals, and I propose this: the hit point system as designed for D&D is not granular enough to account for minor damage, whether it’s paper cuts, mild bruising, or even (potentially) “merely a flesh wound.”

Point 3 is actually a complaint about how damage is handled, and the fact that the placement and severity of an attack is abstracted away in the roll to hit and the damage roll.  A properly places strike is represented by a high damage roll; a lesser strike is a lower roll (and thus less injury).  This is very similar to Point 1 (all HP measures is how close you are to death, not alternate goals) and Point 2 (D&D Hit Points, and combat rules in general, aren’t granular enough to model this level of detail).  The trick of a called shot dealing bonus damage is a common patch for targeting vulnerable areas, though I think it’s a weak (if often “good enough”) tool for the job.  The Rogue’s sneak attack/backstab feature essentially models the same thing, allowing the rogue to score extra damage when they have an opening because they can strike a vulnerable spot.  This is a complaint against the structures around hit points, rather than hit points themselves.

Point 4 I think is a real issue, and because of that it’ll need to be addressed at greater length in it’s own post (or posts, depending on how this discussion goes).

Part 2

Assumptions, Why I’m Playing

There are a bunch of reasons to play RPGs, and these reasons will color both how we approach the game and what we find satisfying.  I think it’s important to put down my own preferences, since that will color the problems I encounter and the solutions I choose to fix those problems.

I grew up on RPGs being all about story; I had a plot I wanted to run my players through, even if that plot was just “the players are heroes and the fight the bad guys and right wrongs.” I got burned out of that pretty quickly because it was a constant struggle for me to get the player’s do to “the right thing” and move the plot along. I recently discovered the OCR and read the Quick Primer to Old School Gaming, and though I agree with a number of the main points (Game Balance, Ming Vase, Moose Head) I eventually decided that I’m not “old school.”  This is mostly because I don’t agree with the idea that the focus should be on Player Skill rather than Character Ability; that’s a perfectly valid way to play, but it’s not what interests me.  It strikes me that the emphasis there is on Role-Playing Game, and I’m more interested is a Role-Playing Game.  For me, the character (and, by extension, the world he inhabits) is more important.

Saying that I want the emphasis to be on role-playing, though, brings a lot of baggage with it.  I don’t mean that I want to avoid rolling dice, that Combat is my enemy, that acting ability is key, or any thing else that’s attached to “role-players.” What’s important to me is that they player assumes an identity, is presented a situation, makes a decision based on who his character is, and experiences the consequences of his actions (leading to a new situation and further decisions).  This is the heart of role-playing, and all the other bits (rules, dice, acting, etc) facilitate that activity.

With that basic core established, there are lots of ways to do it.  You can have quality role-playing with pretty much any system, or no system at all.  You can use dice, cards, numerical stats, descriptive words — most of us have engaged in this sort of activity since we were kids laying Cops and Robbers (or whatever variation was popular with your group; my childhood was spent playing TMNT on the monkey bars).

Personally, I’m a crunchy sort of guy; I want a system that is consistent and “realistic enough” that I feel like it can model situations close to what I would expect in the real world.  My reasons for this are because I believe the rules should facilitate role-playing (making a decision based on your character), and so I want rules that help express the situation (and actions and consequences) in an understandable way. When the rules model the world, and that model resembles the reality we actually live in, it becomes easier to place ourselves in our character’s shoes.  When the rules are ‘realistic enough’ we can reason about our character’s actions the way we reason about our own actions, and when they’re consistent we can base our decisions on past experiences.

I do think there’s a place for DM Fiat and Rulings (rather than Rules), but I think they should be used sparingly, and only to fill in the gaps where the rules don’t accurately model reality.  If your target is a mortal, a dagger to the throat should kill him, regardless of what damage rolls and hit points say.  That’s a gap in the rules and should be handled appropriately.  The same can and should be said in other places where the rules present non-intuitive results.  But if Rules are the result of consistent Rulings (which I believe they are), there is value in developing new rules to address these gaps when we can (to the extent that it makes sense).

Those “rules to address gaps” is what this blog is directed toward.  Since I know 3.X and Pathfinder that’s where most of my effort is focused currently, but I’m interested in discussing other systems as well (especially as I broaden my horizons).

Crit Die

As a follow-up to my quick note on combat, here’s the idea of the Crit/Fumble Die. I had a discussion about crits with my players, and where I like having a cit-confirmation system, they almost all preferred a natural-20-always-crits system.

My preference stems from the math and what we end up modeling.  With cit-confirmation, when you roll a 20 you get an auto-hit and then roll again to confirm, hitting the creatures AC again (doesn’t need to be another 20) means you get a critical hit.  This means that there’s always a 5% chance to hit your opponent (auto-hit on a natural 20), and additionally that 5% of all your hits are going to be criticals.  You’ll hit weaker enemies more, and thus get more crits on them, and tougher enemies will be hit less and have proportionally fewer crits.  I’m building a similar system for fumbles because I like using them, but “always fumble on a natural 1” just adds in too much chaos (5% of all your swings are dismal failures).

Counter-wise, a 20-always-crits system means that 5% of all your swings (not your hits) will be critical hits.  You will crit as much on strong enemies as you do on weak enemies, and if you have auto-hit on 20 as well you will *only* crit on tough enemies.  That means 95% of the time you can’t touch the guy, and the other 5% you’re landing devastating blows.  That just feels wrong.

But all my players see is that they roll a 20 and then I “rob” them of their crit when they fail to confirm.  And I can see the logic in that.  The Crit/Fumble die is my proposed solution, divorcing the “did I hit him” roll from the “did I crit him” roll.  Each attack rolls 2d20, with one designated as the hit-die and one as the crit-die.  If the hit-die beats the target’s AC, you hit and deal damage; if the hit-die is a natural 20, you auto-hit regardless of AC, but it has nothing to do with a critical strike.  If you hit and the crit-die is a 20 (regardless of what the hit-die was), then it’s a critical strike.  If you roll a 20 on the crit-die but miss with the hit-die, it was a good swing that just didn’t connect.  And of course, if you miss with the hit-die and the crit-die is a 1, you just fumbled and something bad happens.

You’ll have 5% of your hits be critical, 5% of you misses will be fumbles, and 5% of your attacks with be auto-hits and auto-misses.  But hopefully the perception that failing to confirm a crit “robs” the player of anything.

Quick Note on Combat

Dr. Gentleman has a series of posts about Combat that I’m trying (and mostly failing) to read.  This post isn’t really about anything I’ve read there, but it has Combat on my mind, and Gnome Stew just posted a little trick about color-coding your dice that I thought was neat, and all that reminded me of a trick of my own that I’d been meaning to mention.

People complain about the speed of combat a lot — roll d20 to hit, what did you get?, that hits now roll damage, what did you get?, describe results of the attack, next action.  With even a handful of players it gets bogged down quickly, especially if there are NPCs (enemies and/or allies) involved.  But it doesn’t have to be this way, really.

A simple trick that I’ve used, and that I’m surprised doesn’t get used more, is to chuck a handful of dice.  Instead of making each piece of the attack sequence a separate roll, grab a d20 and whatever damage dice you use and toss it in one throw.  If the d20 hits the AC damage is already on the table, and you haven’t wasted any real effort if you miss.  I’ve considered adding a Crit/Fumble die to the mix so that crits are confirmed in the same throw as well.  With a little color-coding, you can quickly see hit-die, damage-dice, backstab-dice, crit-die and so on.  It becomes a lot more roll-and-go, especially if DMs aren’t coy about monster ACs (which I don’t think they should be, in general). If people start thinking about their next action before it’s their turn (something my players need practise doing), it gets even smoother.

The Purpose Of This Blog

So it’s been a couple of months now, and I wanted to reiterate the purpose of this blog; partly because I have lots of new readers (I assume, since my daily pageviews are about double what they used to be), but mostly to remind myself what I’m trying to do.

So first, a little bit about what this blog is not.  Contrary to a number of my posts, it is not a blog for apologizing for Dungeons and Dragons. I find myself doing that a lot because (1) to address the topics this blog is about I need to set down what my assumptions are, and (2) there seem to be a lot of people who want to knock D&D over because of it’s flaws.  It is a flawed system (that’s a big part of the motivation of this blog), but I like it and feel that there are a lot of things it does very well.  I also know that I was anti-3.X for years because of misunderstandings and misinterpretations of the system, and I’m hoping to help others who may be in a similar spot.  If you don’t like D&D that’s fine, I don’t think you’re a flawed human being and I’m sure we can both find games we like and talk about general RPG elements we hold in common.  D&D isn’t even the only system I’ll talk about here, though it is one that I’m most familiar with and my go-to system (especially if you consider Pathfinder to be “D&D”).

Also, contrary to how some future posts may sound, this blog isn’t really about reviewing RPG products, particularly setting material or adventures.  There may be bits in both that I pull out and look at, and some products address the same things I’m interested in and might get something closer to a full review.

What this blog is about is the various gaming systems and structures, and the fact that many of the RPGs on the shelves are missing large pieces of what I feel should be included in an RPG system.  Specifically, I’m looking to make this a kind of “toolbox” for DMs to come and find the right tool for their campaign needs.  I’ve been DMing for years, and often felt like I was fighting with my players, my setting, and my system to make interesting things happen.  Reading through The Alexandrian, it struck me that missing game structures was at the heart of almost all my problems (with the tension of player agency being a close second).  I’m interested in talking about the hobby, discussing differing preferences and play-styles, and in general geeking-out about Role-Playing Games (fantasy and otherwise).

But in the end this should be a place I can go to find a system for falling damage, or a system for overland travel, or a system for diplomatic negotiations — and preferable a nice variety of each so that I can season my games to taste. And if others benefit from it too, so much the better.

Level 20: Realm of the Gods

The Preamble

In the comments on my post about Falling Damage, Brenden mentioned his mechanisms for making falling “always scary” but allowing good luck to save you from even extreme falls.  I liked the system but noted that I don’t think falling is always scary, because eventually the PCs are at near-god levels, and Superman isn’t afraid of falling off a building or two.  From there, Dr. Gentleman posted this:

I think the idea that higher-level characters in D&D are akin to demigods is one that makes the system make more sense (and actually makes me want to look at 3e again), but I don’t think that’s the intent of D&D. Heroes go on adventures, gain experience, skills, abilities, and treasure, but they’re still essentially human (elf, dwarf, or whatever). The idea that an exceptional person can gain experience and thereby become the equivalent of a demigod or superhero is not a basic assumption when it comes to D&D, which leads to a lot of complaints about realism. I think that’s a pretty fundamental difference in assumptions, and needs to be explicitly cleared up straight away in these types of discussions.

Except that I think that this is the intent and, if a little buried, that it is fairly clear when you look for what the system ask for.

Making Magic

So I’m going to start off by saying that I’ve never quite understood the major complaints of Vancian magic.  And maybe it’s just that I’ve never seen them presented clearly, but a quick moment of googling before starting on this post didn’t help clear things up.

Protip: use Divination to help prepare tomorrow’s spells

As near as I can tell, Vancian casting is the sort where a Wizard has to prepare spells ahead of time, and one fired off he needs to take time to rest and ‘recharge his batteries.’  A common complaint seems to be that a Wizard has to predict what sorts of spells they’ll need at the beginning of the day and if they guess wrong, oh well.  That could be pretty frustrating, but as far as 3.X/Pathfinder goes (which seem to get the brunt of the complaints) that’s not actually the case.  From the SRD (emphasis mine):

When preparing spells for the day, a wizard can leave some of these spell slots open. Later during that day, she can repeat the preparation process as often as she likes, time and circumstances permitting. During these extra sessions of preparation, the wizard can fill these unused spell slots. She cannot, however, abandon a previously prepared spell to replace it with another one or fill a slot that is empty because she has cast a spell in the meantime. That sort of preparation requires a mind fresh from rest. Like the first session of the day, this preparation takes at least 15 minutes, and it takes longer if the wizard prepares more than one-quarter of her spells.

In many places, the text talks about “preparing spells for the day”, the need for 8 hours of rest followed by 1 hour of preparation, and so on, but the above text notes that a Wizard can leave some slots flexible for when they do know what they’re up against.  The Wizard still needs time to prepare, which is a key differentiators between them and spontaneous-casting Sorcerers, but it isn’t a “hope you guess right” situation.

Fire and Forget

Another common complaint seems to be that it doesn’t make sense* that a Wizard needs to re-memorize his spells each time he wants to cast them, that the memories of the spell are somehow ‘burned’ out of his mind as he casts.  I did see someone note that this is a pretty interesting thing to think about, and kind of creepy, that casting spells can actually rip thoughts out of your head, or that a spell is a kind of entity that moved out of the mage’s mind and in to the world when cast.  I agree that those are neat ideas, but I think they’re also unnecessary.

In many places, the rules talk about a Wizard needing to “memorize” spells, but they also use the term “preparation.”  In a lot of ways it seems more reasonable that a Wizard essentially half-casts his spells during preparation, leaving the final 3-second trigger to be completed when he actually intends to use the spell.  Under that interpretation it’s not that he forgets the spells he uses, but he has to set them up again.  And part of the measure of a mage is how many different spells he can “hold” in that half-cast state at a time (and total, in a day, before being sapped of energy).

Spell Slots vs Mana

The last complaint seems to be that spell slots don’t make sense.  This comes in two flavors: the one that argues that magic energy should recharge evenly over time, and the one that argues that you should be able to ‘fit’ more lower-level spells in a higher level spell slot.  I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with either of those systems, it’s just those aren’t the assumptions that D&D Magic makes.  it’s a fairly modular system, and you can pretty easily pull out Vancian magic and substitute any other system in it’s place without changing the rest of the game much t all.  But I think spell slots are just as reasonable as any other system.

In the D&D mechanics, magic doesn’t recharge evenly over time; accessing those energies is taxing, and a Wizard needs an extended period of light activity or sleep before he can recover, mentally and physically, to work magic again.  I’ve seen mana-point systems that work similarly, where mana won’t regenerate during combat, etc, and it’s really just a design choice.  You could easily have X spell slots recover over Y hours if you want and essentially have the same thing as mana.

The question of how many spells should ‘fit’ in a spell slot is a matter of what that slot represents.  If a spell slot is a quantum of energy, then I would agree that a slot which can power a 3rd Level spell should contain enough energy for several 1st Level spells.  Instead, I think spell slots represent the Wizard’s capacity, both in terms of how many half-spells he can hold at a time and how much casting he can perform in a day.  Higher level spells are restricted to the slots they ‘fit’ in because they’re harder to handle and maintain so the Wizard can only manage a couple at a time.  And regardless of the spells cast, he can only channel so much energy in a day before he’d tapped out, likely drained physically, mentally, and emotionally.

Final Comments

No system is going to satisfy everyone, because we all have slightly different goals and preferences.  I’m not saying that no one should dislike Vancian casting, but I am making the case that Vancian Magic is not less valid as a system than any of it’s competitors.

*While I do talk about the need for game systems to be realistic and “make sense” in order to facilitate role playing and decision making, there are limits — we’re talking about a world with dragons and demons walking the earth, and where a pinch of sulfur and a few hand motions makes a fireball; is it that much more difficult to accept that magic burns away memories as it’s cast?

Why Falling Damage Is Unrealistic

Thanks to a post by Shortymonster I stumbled over to the Large Polyhedron Collider (A+ on the blog name), where he’s got a post about the Realities of Falling.  He sets out a few milestones: serious injuries occur from falling 25-30ft onto a hard surface, and death is very likely from a fall of 50-60 feet (onto a hard surface).  He goes on to talk about falling into soft surfaces (like deep water, or snow), and the differences landing orientation makes, and the kind of damage you can expect to do if you land on crates or a car or another person.

Because of this, I think we need to change the way falling damage is handled in D&D: as it is, it’s just too lethal to be realistic.

Assumptions: Rewards

I’ve been mulling over this post for a little bit now, but John Arcadian at Gnome Stew just made a post about running a no-character-advancement game which has spurred me to actually put pen to paper and say what I think.

The Gnome Stew post talks about the idea of playing a campaign where characters do not advance in level, or alternatively only advance during downtime between story arcs.  It lists a number of benefits to this approach, not the least of which, in my opinion, is eliminating the sense of “my character will be awesome at Level 5.”  Your character is awesome now.  John makes a few other good points and it’s worth a quick read; this post is more about the assumptions and expectations of rewards in D&D.

One of the trends that bothers me about D&D rewards is that it seems like the expected reward, from both players and DMs, is experience points.  When characters complete some goal — rescue the princess, kill the goblins, solve the puzzle — they might get some treasure, they may get some in-game renown, they could open up previously-inaccessible areas.  But across the board it’s expected that they’ll get Experience points.  The concern and the danger is that the difference in power from one level to the next is a bit more than most people expect, and the assumption of Experience-as-default-reward will tend to move you quickly up that scale.  If “regular people” are 1st or 2nd Level and “historical legends” are 4th and 5th Level, an assumption that has characters advancing to Herculean-tier power in a handful of adventures is problematic.

Because of this, I think that reigning in experience rewards in favor of gold, magic items, renown, and influence over the game world can lead to a richer (heh) gaming experience.  I almost always run my games with Pathfinder’s “slow progression” XP scale, which is about 150% of the standard scale, but even before reading the Gnome Stew post I’d considered removing XP rewards entirely and tying Level Advancement directly to story-arc milestones and accomplishments.  If going up in level means developing skills beyond a character’s professional peers, or at the mid- and high-end of the scale becoming more than human or even godlike, it makes sense to tether that to a pivotal moment when the character accomplishes some feat or destroys the Big Bad.  Hitting 4th Level because you killed your 47th Goblin just feels wrong.

Of course, I’m not sure I care for a game with no character advancement, but that’s something that should be seasoned to taste.  As John says, if you start in the sweet spot, when your character is awesome and the situations you face and interesting and challenging, who needs character advancement?

D&D Next Petition

So Michael over at Neuroglyph Games has a post up about a petition to WotC to reconsider the path they’re taking with 5th Edition.  Unsurprisingly, he takes his cues from the Open Letter to WotC that was published a couple months ago, and his message is the same: 5e is unlikely to unite the market, and the market doesn’t need to be united.  We like our various rules systems at the best thing to do, for both WotC and Gamers, is to re-release the old systems, continue support for all rules sets, and release content that people will buy.  He notes that there’s loads of material for old systems that never got converted to newer rules sets, and new modules could be written and statted for use with all forms of the game.

There’s a Kickstarter up right now that I think shows a great model for this sort of thing: The Bestiary of the Curiously Odd is a Bestiary book that’s going to bee 200+ pages of monster descriptions and fluff, without any stats; then they’ll publish no less than 3 smaller statbooks, for Pathfinder, OSRIC, and Traveller rules systems.  They just tripled* the market for that bestiary for the cost of a couple small softcovers.  WotC could do the same thing — write up one book with the adventure descriptions and NPCs, and a series of statbooks so that the adventure could be run for 1e, 2e, 3e, 4e…  And with print-on-demand capabilities, you can even avoid a lot of the traditional costs that would be associated with storage, etc.

Michael’s petition is up on Change.org, and since I know a lot of my readers are non-US I want to point out the “outside the US” link on the form as well; I don’t know that it will get noticed by anyone at WotC or Hasbro, but I think it’s at least worth voicing our opinion.

On Charisma

I touched on this a little bit in my post about Wisdom, but one of my biggest complaints about the D&D Attributes is the designer’s apparent confusion over what Charisma is.

A high Charisma gives you a bonus on Bluff, Disguise, Diplomacy, Handle Animal, Intimidate, Perform, and Use Magic Device.  It also gives you a bonus when determining the followers you can attract (per the Leadership feat), and Charisma is used on any check that involves influencing others.  It describes a character’s personal magnetism and ability to lead.  A low Charisma penalizes these same things, making it harder to intimidate, persuade, beguile, or lead others.  In pretty much very case, Charisma is treated as a character’s strength of personality, their confidence, and their assertiveness.

But when describing racial traits, Charisma isn’t about confidence and assertiveness, it’s about likeability.  Dwarves are “a bit gruff,” Goblins are “unpleasant,” and both get a penalty to Charisma.  They got it right with Aasimar and Halflings and Drow, who are “Confident,” “Strong-willed,” and “Manipulative” but they mess it up with Gnomes and Tieflings and Catfolk who are “Agreeable,” “Unnerving,” and “Sociable.” Orcs get a penalty for being “savage.”  Sure, it makes sense for getting a penalty to Diplomacy for being gruff or unnerving or savage, but why should the samehurt Intimidate?  I agree that Goblins should have a CHA penalty, but it’s because they’re spineless cowards not because they’re rude or ugly.  Do people really believe lies if you’re likable (or, would you really be likable if you were known for being able to tell lies)?  Does a Magic Device really care how sociable you are?

So here’s a quick run-down of how I would recast the Races’ attributes:

Asimar: +2 WIS, +2 CHA; Insightful and Confident
Drow: +2 DEX, +2 CHA, -2 CON; Nimble, Manipulative, and Delicate
Dwarves: +2 STR, +2 CON, -2 DEX; Strong but Stunted
Catfolk: +2 DEX, +2 CHA, -2 WIS; Agile, Self-assured, but lacking Common Sense
Gnomes: +2 CON, +2 WIS, -2 STR; Hardy, Wise, and Weak
Goblins: +4 DEX, -2 STR, -2 CHA; Quick, Weak, and Spineless (or alternately -2 WIS for Foolish)
Halflings: +2 DEX, +2 CHA, -2 STR; Nimble, Strong-willed, Weak
Orc: +4 STR, -2 INT, -2 WIS, -2 CHA; Strong, Dim, and Unfocused
Tiefling:+2 INT, +2 CHA; Intelligent and Manipulative

Quick NPCs

NPCs are the bread and butter of a DM’s toolkit; unless you’re running an adventure deep in the wilderness, your characters are going to run in to other people.  And if they have access to a settlement of any decent size, they may easily meet lots of people.  It’s possible to hand-wave this so they interact with nameless merchants and get rumors from faceless street urchins, but in a lot of cases that could lessen the game.  So lots of DMs put work into coming up with ways to make quick NPCs, and  thought I might add such a method to my Toolbox here.

Given my assumptions, almost everyone my characters meet with be Level 1 Commoners with average stats.  The few craftsmen may be Experts, men-at-arms will be Warriors, and the rare witch or holy man will be an Adept. Rulers and high society will be made up of mostly the same, with the top few actually being classed as Aristocrats (just because you’re high-born doesn’t mean you necessarily take that path).  In short, most random NPCs are probably going to be Commoners or Warriors.

When I’m actually statting an NPC, I like to use the Basic Array (13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8), but it’s probably best to assume that most people will have 10s across the board (it’s Average for a reason).  Conveniently, Commoners and Warriors both get 2+Int Skills, and have essentially the same class skills: Climb, Craft, Handle Animal, Profession, Ride, and Swim — Warriors add Intimidate and Commoners add Perception.  Pick two skills to get a +4 on and everything else is a +0 and you’re done.

Warriors are proficient with all weapons and armors, 5hp, and have a +1 BAB and +2 Fort.  Commoners are proficient with a single weapon and no armor, 3hp, and get no other bonuses.  You can usually ignore things like Feats and Traits for random NPCs (if they become important enough to care, you may just fully stat them between sessions).

If necessary, add a +1 bonus to the appropriate stats if you’re creating a non-human NPC (so elves get +1 in DEx and Dex-based skills, and +1 in Int an extra Skill).

What’s In A Name?

The biggest consideration (since stats are fairly straight-forward) is the character’s name; if you’re doing it off-the-cuff you’re likely to end up with something silly-sounding or “Bob.”  The best thing to do is generate a couple dozen names for Males, Females, and Surnames, and just mix-and-match as necessary (I could easily see a random table for putting together names, and you could vary the frequency of certain names if you think “Tomen” is a common name for halflings in your world).  I generally choose a style for each of my main races: dwarves have Norse-based names, halflings have Gaelic-based ones, and so on.

On Assumptions

An interesting consequence to these “average NPCs” is the fact that most people will easily die to a single sword thrust (the expected result of a Short Sword is 3 damage, 4 for a Long Sword; a Greatsword will fell even trained men-at-arms in one swing), and a creature that has a +2 to damage is essentially guaranteed to kill them if it hits.  This makes Orcs (with a +2 average STR mod) much more frightening to regular folks.

 

By The Law

This started as a reply to Brian’s comment on my last post, but quickly ballooned into something too big for a comment thread.  Brian said he likes my notions on the 3×3 Alignment (thanks, so do I) but he feels like there really needs to be consequences for breaking alignment — “If you’re a lawful good paladin and you strike down an enemy out of anger instead of in the name of your deity, there should be repercussions.”

Generally I agree, but I need to do a lot of unpacking to get at what I mean. There are a lot of things going on with that deceptively simple question.  First, yes, there should be repercussions for acting out of alignment; but there should be repercussions for any meaningful action, so this doesn’t really tell us much.  What I think Brian means, though, is that D&D has traditionally had mechanical and class-based penalties for breaking out of alignment, and this has traditionally meant that a Paladin can not lie for fear of losing their powers and being reduced to less-than-a-Fighter — how would I deal with that actuality?

I think that there are a few things going on here.  There’s how how Alignment affects a class, Alignment affects a character, and how Alignment affects the world.  I’ll address them in reverse order.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here: it gets long.

On A Cubed Alignment

I like alignment systems.

I think the D&D Nine get a short shrift by most people, who’ve decided they don’t like a game that tells them what they can and can’t do.  (I think that’s a misunderstanding of the system.)  But there’s also the various Morality scales in White Wolf’s World of Darkness (Morality, Humanity, Clarity, etc); the Palladium Seven (two Good, two Selfish, and three Evil), though they strike me as much more prescriptive than D&D; and a variety of similar “this is how my character thinks and perceives the world” systems in other games.  I think they’re very useful tools for Role Playing and give a quick handle for internal and external conflicts.

One gripe I have with the D&D Nine is the choice of Good vs Evil as an axis.  It’s a reasonable choice to make, and like many things in D&D I’m pretty sure it developed organically over decades, but it seems to me that there’s a lot of baggage that comes with those terms.  After all, no one gets up in the morning and thinks “I’m going to be evil today” (with the possible exception of cosmic forces, I guess).  No one thinks of themselves as a bad person (even if they do bad things, it’s always justifiable, at least in their minds).  The catch, of course, is that the definition D&D gives these terms doesn’t line up with the baggage they come with — Good talks about putting the needs of others above your own needs, even to the point of risk to yourself; Evil talks about a willingness to hurt and enslave others if it is convenient or expedient, essentially putting your needs above anyone else’s.  It could be properly recast as “Altruistic vs Egoistic,” but that’s hardly as approachable as “Good vs Evil.” It’s also a lot less vague.

Yesterday, the Gassy Gnoll proposed that “Holy vs Unholy” should replace “Good vs Evil” and that it should be relative to the character, so what’s Holy for a follower of Pelor is very different from what’s Holy for a follower of Nerull.  Brendan commented that he liked the idea of Holy vs Unholy, but that it shouldn’t be relative, so Holy meant the same thing whether you followed Pelor or Nerull, it’s just Nerull’s followers oppose the Holy.  I don’t think that fixes the problems I have with Good vs Evil, and in fact it probably makes them worse, but it struck me that it could be an interesting addition to alignment, a Cubed Alignment instead of 3×3.

But what would that look like? What’s the difference between Lawful Good Holy and Lawful Good Unholy? Wait, scratch that.  Saying someone is Good Unholy or Evil Holy is going to quickly turn in to nonsense, so let’s start by replacing the current Good and Evil with Altruistic and Egoistic.  So what’s the difference between Lawful Altruistic Holy and Lawful Altruistic Unholy?  Can we even make sense of what this third axis could be?

Let’s look at the Axises we currently have, first.  In Law vs Chaos, Law represents order, honor, tradition, and authority; Chaos represents individualism, freedom, and impulse.  Neutral characters are neither particularly bound to honor or tradition, but also don’t chafe under it or feel a need to resist or rebel.  In Altruism vs Egoism, Altruism is about putting the needs of others before your own, even to the point of sacrifice; Egoism is about putting your needs above the needs of others, to the point of being callous or cruel.  Neutral characters try to be good neighbors, but generally are neither willing to sacrifice themselves nor victimize others.

So what about Holy vs Unholy? I’m honestly not really sure how we should cast the terms.  In some cases, Holy refers to association with or supporting the gods, and unholy would be anything aimed against them.  I don’t think that’s what we’re aiming for.  In other cases, Unholy is the same as wickedness, and Holy is some combination of Lawfulness and Altruism.  I don’t think that’s what we want either.  We could put it in terms of suffering, where Holy creatures strive to decrease suffering and Unholy creatures strive to increase it; or we could put it in vague terms like Good and Evil, or Light and Dark, where Unholy creatures strive for negative ends and Holy creatures strive for positive ends.  But the more I think of it, the less I feel it really adds anything.

Maybe I just need to give it more thought.  Anyone out there have ideas I might be missing?

Protect Us From Evil

There are a couple posts I read today about alignment, and since alignment is something I care about quite a bit, I wanted to toss my two cents in.

Alignment in 4th Edition

The first post is from the Dungeon’s Master, where he questions the importance of Alignment in 4th Edition.  He notes that 4E pared down the long-held Nine Alignments to five, and that two of those five are explicitly barred from Player Characters.  He goes on to note that there are no penalties to changing alignments, and that the alignments that remain are so broad and all-encompassing that it’s unlikely that a character would stray from them any ways.  He wonders if alignment even matters in 4th Edition.

To that I think I would respond that no, alignment doesn’t matter in 4th Edition.  That’s not to say that I think it can’t matter in a campaign using the 4E system — it can, and like the Dungeon’s Master I think it should — but it’s my opinion that 4th Edition has a drastically different perspective on what D&D is than it’s predecessors did, and that different perspective doesn’t care much about alignment.

D&D has grown and changed over the years; this becomes more and more apparent as I read up about Chainmail and OD&D compared to the 3.X that I was introduced to.  It was a war game that turned into an adventure game that became a role playing game.  And as a role playing game, alignment aid the player in getting into they’re character’s head.  It informs the player what their character’s morals and values are, and that should be used to inform the decisions and actions he makes.  Why must a Paladin be Lawful Good?  Because those are the values someone must hold before they would take up such a calling.  Why must a rogue be non-Good?  Because you can’t burglarize people on a regular basis and hold values focused on “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”  These aren’t straight-jackets or lists of things your character can’t do, they’re things your character wouldn’t do and the perspective he has on the world around him.  I believe the penalties associated with changing alignment in 1e and 2e are just ways of making the game care about alignment; they look like pretty ham-fisted ways from my point of view, but they’re the proverbial stick to encourage the player to consider his alignment before acting.

On Religion

Shorty Monster has a post over on his blog about religion in role playing games.   His complaints are essentially three points: all fantasy games have the “same” gods, where “same” means that they follow similar “sphere of influence” styles; devotees of fantasy religions don’t behave the way devotees of real-world religions do, in that they are all “a homogenous lump” of identical personalities; and that fantasy religions are more-monolithic and less-fractured than real-world religions.

I think the the first point may be a valid observation, but I think it’s because each fantasy setting is trying to work off the same trope, ie, the Greek or Norse pantheons.  I don’t think that’s really a problem, the same way I don’t think ripping inspiration from other sources is a problem.  If it unnecessarily limits your choices then it’s a bad thing, but that’s true for any source of inspiration and can easily be fixed (by adding a new god, a new religion, or changing the way current gods and religions behave).

The other two points are really more about how devotees and religious organizations are played, rather than a problem with their foundation.  Shorty notes that not a lot of details are given about dogma or observances (though, looking up Greyhawk gods on Wikipedia gives you quite a bit of information) and complains that there isn’t enough to go on to portray a devout character.  That may be a fair point, but 1) I think a lot of it is left for the GM to fill out, because GMs tend to want to customize and build the setting to their own tastes (your mileage may vary as to whether that’s a sufficient excuse for leaving out material), and 2) I don’t think most fantasy gods or religions are based on strictly-ordered religions like modern real-world religions.  A character prays to Pelor because he wants a strong crop yield, not because Pelor imposes a certain moral paradigm.  A cleric devotes himself to Kord in order to embody strength and victory, not because Kord is the one true god.  And a cult leaves offerings for Nerull because they fear him, or wish to direct him towards their enemies, not because of… well, OK, I’m at a loss for what else might motivate them.

For my part there are two things that I’m concerned about in my fantasy religions: the problem of divine accessibility, and the problem of definitive orthodoxy.  They’re really both related to each other, but it’s the difference in how you approach the issue.

Why do Good Gods let Bad Things happen?

Putting other things aside, a common theme in fantasy setting (whether it’s RPGs or books or movies) is that the heroes have to go out and fight evil because they’re the only ones who can.  But if the gods actually exist, especially if they have great powers to act upon the world, then why don’t they just fix the problem?  If Pelor hates the undead so much, why doesn’t he just wipe them out with a miracle, instead of sending frail mortals to hunt them down and destroy them one-by-one?  If Moradin protects the dwarves, why doesn’t he smite the hobgoblin army that’s laying siege?

This can be handled in a number of ways.  Perhaps the god’s attention is elsewhere, addressing a greater threat like an Evil god working at cross purposes, and an unseen enemy who would overtake our heroes if not for the god’s interference.  Or maybe the god is hesitant to interact with the world directly because doing so would make him vulnerable to his enemies (sapping his energy, or forcing him into an assailable state), and so directing mortal agents is the safer (if less sure) method of influencing the world.  Perhaps Pelor can’t root out the undead because he has no power in dark places (though, if that’s the case, questions about the nature of clerics and divine magic come up), or perhaps in directing his power against the undead there would be innocents caught up in the destruction.  Superman doesn’t have to be the only one who lives in a world of cardboard.

How can we argue about the will of Zeus if we can just ask him directly?

Here’s the problem: if we can speak to the gods directly, and they can answer us directly, it is essentially impossible to have a difference of opinion on what that god wants us to do.  Two reasonable people can’t argue over whether killing cows offends Zeus or not if they can just ask him directly and get a clear yes or no.  And because of this, you can’t have different sects that worship the same god coming into conflict or working at cross purposes.  Any question or conflict internal to the church can be resolved by asking The Big Guy what takes priority. The Abrahamic/Judeo-Christians among us might point to the earliest days of their faith and note that just being able to talk to your god doesn’t prevent misunderstandings, but given time and opportunity those things can be cleared up: someone’s right and someone’s wrong, and it’s just a matter of asking the question.

This one is harder to fix, I think.  On the one hand, you could allow your gods to make inconsistent or conflicting statements, and you could even hand wave it by saying that he knows more than mortals and just has a hard time expressing all the nuance that occupies a god’s mind.  It strikes me that that would be a pretty difficult god to follow or put much faith in, because it essentially boils down to “we do not and can not know what he wants,” which is a sure path to agnosticism if nothing else.  Followers of such a god will probably find other gods to cling to.

Alternatively, you could restrict talking to the gods to just their clergy, and so lay people could have arguments among themselves just fine.  The trouble is that then “just ask Zeus” simple becomes “just ask Zeus’s priest,” and the best you can hope for is a wicked priest intentionally acting against his professed god.  And when 9 out of 10 clerics agree, the 10th one must be a filthy liar.  I really think that for fantasy religions to “work” in the sense of reasonable and committed devotees disagreeing with each other (especially to the point of conflict) the gods must be remote enough or vague enough that getting clear and simple answers is not clear or simple.

Good, Bad, I’m the one with the Holy Symbol

My preference is to have remote and disinterested (or preoccupied) gods. Maybe they live on Mount Olympus and even getting an audience with them is an epic quest.  Maybe they exist outside creation and can not directly interact with it for fear of annihilating it (or themselves).  Maybe they don’t even actually exist, and at best the gods are magical creatures like Elementals or Dragons and clerics are essentially sorcerers and witches.  It doesn’t really matter (unless I’m directly addressing the question with my campaign) because the gods don’t really matter to me.  They aren’t what I’m interested in.

The things that interest me in role-playing games are the characters (PCs and NPCs) and the societies and organizations they interact with.  In most cases what a character or group believes is is far more important (and interesting) than what is true.  So I tend to have the nature of the gods be an open question, because it’s not high on my list of priorities, and leaving it unanswered allows for a lot more variation in the religions and interactions available in my world.

Setting Up Systems

So I’ve been trying (and mostly failing) to prepare for a quick little hex-crawl game to run with my wife.  A big problem for me is, apparently, “information architecture” or “how do I know what I know?”  I thought I’d use some space here to talk about what my plans are, structurally.

I’m planning on using a six mile hex as the basis of my map, and I’ll plot geography based on Welsh Piper’s guidelines (though it’s a bit of a kludge since I’m not using their Atlas Hex, template for now).  The bulk of my hexcrawl system I’m going to be taking from The Alexandrian (though it seems to have stalled after the 7th entry); I’m planning on keeping the hex structure invisible to my players, and Justin has a good system for tracking progress over the grid, getting lost and getting found, sight lines, encounters and encounter distance, and so on.  I’ll be keying each hex to a ‘default location,’ and then building up encounter tables. (Of course, on a 180mi by 180mi map, that’s 800 to 900 unique locations to key…)    Justin hasn’t given us an example of his tables yet, and I may use some combination of the one-page encounters, multi-table encounters, and hand-keyed encounters I’ve mentioned before.

I’m using the time structure I mentioned before (with simple actions taking a minute and longer actions taking a turn, when it matters to track them). I’m going to have 4-week month (aligned with the cycle of the moon), 13 months in a year (for 364 days total).

I’m putting together a year of weather per Gnome Stew’s suggestion, and may be incorporating other systems from Dragon 137 and the Wilderness Survival Guide (both of which I’ve recently purchased).  I’ll probably use a tracking sheet not unlike the one that inspired Gnome Stew.

I feel like I’m still missing some structures that I need to account for, and this doesn’t get into the real meat of the setting (ie, the city-states and societies that will be the focus of the crawl).

Assumptions, Levels and Tiers

One of the biggest take-aways from Justin’s Calibrating Your Expectations is the meaning of levels.  He says that he began writing the post in part to address all the people who said that “D&D Can’t Do Conan” because making a Level 20 Barbarian gives you a guy who can do things the actual Conan never could.  Or “D&D Can’t Do Einstein” because a Level 20 Expert would have way too many hit points for a frail old math geek.  The argument he makes is that people are looking at Level the wrong way, and they’re expecting Level 20 (or Level 5, or Level 12) to mean something that it doesn’t.

Justin makes the argument that pretty much everyone you’ve ever known would be a Level 1 character.  Really exceptional people might be Level 2 or Level 3.  Level 4 characters are some of the most talented and accomplished people in the world, and Level 5 characters are the people who get written about in history books.  From there he calls 6th level superhuman, a 10th Level character is challenging gods to contests of skill, and a 20th Level character is essentially a god themselves.  He bases his argument off of skill bonuses available at level 1 and DCs attached to certain activities.  But there are other clues, too.

A 5th Level character is taking on manticores, trolls, and young dragons; the exploits of Beowulf.  Heroes of Greek myth fought a minotaur (CR4), a hydra (CR4), and Medusa (CR7).  At Level 10 characters are fighting Greater Elementals and huge extra-planar spiders. Above level 15 characters a fighting high-level Angels and Demons, and when they reach level 20 they are literally beating up gods and taking their stuff.   Think that those who have made creatures higher than Level 20 are well-meaning but misguided, and I personally believe that Zeus himself can be built as a Level 20 creature. (It gets futzy when you’re talking about CR versus Level, though.)

The long and short of it is as Justin puts it at the end of his post: the 3.X system expects that you’ll move from one power level to an extremely different power level as you level up, but people expect there to be a much more uniform performance from Level 1 to Level 20.  They bend over backwards trying to make the system fit that expectation, so that a 20th Level character can be treated as King Arthur instead of as Thor.  (As an aside, this is precisely why the trend of D&D 5E worries me; they’re trying to flatten the playing scale so that a 20th Level character is still threatened by orcs.  You lose a lot of variety in what the system can model when you do that, and it isn’t necessary.)

And of course, these kind of expectations are really harmful to the game.  If you expect that Aragorn is Level 15 instead of Level 5, then that colors what sorts of adventures you can have at low levels.  You spend the first 5 (or more) Levels of D&D killing rats and goblins and bandits, instead of leading armies, storming castles, and fighting Nazghul.

Assumptions, Attributes and Classes

So I recently had a few conversations that shared a common theme: the assumptions you bring to D&D can drastically change the way you approach the system.  Some of these conversations were about game-world assumptions and while those can change the way you approach the game (a setting where all rogues are thieves is different from a setting where rogues are more likely bored noblemen or commissioned spies), that’s not what I’m interested in talking about right now.  I’d like to put out my assumptions on the Pathfinder/D&D 3.X system mechanics and what they mean.

As I’ve mentioned before, my perspective on D&D is strongly influenced by Justin Alexander’s Calibrating Your Expectations post; I highly recommend that you go read it to get the foundation I’m working from.  I’m going to try to not simply recreate Justin’s post, but he’s covered most of the bases pretty well.

The very first thing to recognize is that, at least the way they’re done today, Player-Characters are not only above average, but they generally approach the peak of mortal ability.  This can be seen in two aspects: Attributes and Class.

Attributes

As Justin notes, PCs use the “elite” array of 15,14,13,12,10,8 (which is the mathmatically expected result of 4d6-drop-lowest, which seems to be the fashion these days for random stats), and based on some statistics in the 3.0 DMG he concludes that this puts them in the top 5% of the population (as far as raw ability and natural talent goes).  Standard NPCs use the 13,12,11,10,9,8 array (this is the expected results of 3d6), and the theoretical “average person” would be 10,10,10,10,10,10 (I actually think that this NPC exists with fair frequency, since any given score describes a small range of ability).

It’s worth noting here that a score of 8 or 9 is “below average,” but that doesn’t mean it’s crippling disability.  I think this is easiest to show with INT, but it can be extended to other attributes.  In a lot of places (though I can’t remember if any were ‘official’) it’s been said that INTx10 gives you a rough idea of the character’s IQ score.  (Palladium Book’s RIFTS system states this explicitly).  “Normal” IQ is considered to be between 70 and 130.  The definition of “mental retardation” doesn’t kick in until below 70, but it’s only mild retardation if it’s above 50; these people can learn to live on their own and maintain a job.  Severe, “unable to function on their own” retardation is marked at 35 and below, and the D&D system marks INT 3 as the lower limit of sentient life.  A dim character has an IQ of 5 to 7; above 7 they might not be the smartest person in the room, but it’s unlikely anyone would notice.  Forrest Gump, I would guess, probably has an IQ of 5 or 6. At the same time, “genius” level IQ was originally set at 140, or INT 14.

I generally consider 18 to be the peak of natural human ability; above that there needs to be something beyond “natural” at work.  By the rules a human COULD roll an 18 and then apply their racial +2 to get a 20, but I generally consider this inappropriate.  I freely admit that this may just be my preference, but that’s most of what we’re talking about anyways.  Demi-humans can surpass the limit of 18, depending on how they’re measured on average versus humans (elves are smarter and more agile, orcs are stronger, etc).  I don’t consider this a double standard; humans are marked by adaptability and I feel that’s the appropriate use of their +2 bonus; demi-humans are noted for other things and as such are expected to surpass humans in certain ways.

Class

When people think about classes, they typically think about Fighters, Rogues, Clerics, Wizards and so on.  That’s reasonable because these are the classes that PCs typically have.  The problem is when people assume that all soldiers are Fighters, all thieves are Rogues, and all priests are Clerics. (Personally, I think a given priest is as likely to be a Rogue as a Cleric, but that may be a discussion for another time).  In fact, these PC classes represent a significant advantage in terms of training and skill above and beyond what’s available to most people.  Most people have NPC Classes — Adept, Aristocrat, Commoner, Expert, and Warrior — these are classes that most people don’t think about because they aren’t meant to represent adventurers.  In 3.X I think these classes are only listed in the DMG, and I’m pretty sure they were essentially ignored in 4E altogether. (I could be wrong on both counts.)  Rogues and Bards are PC-quality Experts, Fighters and Barbarians are PC-quality Warriors, Wizards and Clerics are PC-quality Adepts, and so on.  The PC classes represent a higher level of training, either because you had a better teacher or because you were able to better develop the skills you were given, or some similar situation.  In fact, depending on your world, most people are probably going to be Commoners, with Experts representing artisans, etc.

Conclusion

So, Player-Characters are naturally more gifted than most of the population, and then get better training than even their peers.  This already sets Player-Characters well above the norm, which in turn makes them capable of adventuring and (one hopes) becoming heroes.  But my main take-away is this: although the game may focus around PCs as our protagonists, the mechanics can not be calibrated to PCs as the baseline, because they simply are not baseline characters.  For the world to be consistent, PCs need to be recognized as above the norm and systems should assume average or slightly-above-average NPC-quality abilities.

I have more to say on my assumptions and understanding of the 3.X system (possibly a lot more), but I think this is a good stopping point for the time being.

Supporting Cast

The Professor doesn’t really run a game blog, per se, but the most recent post touches on an issue that I think is A Problem for RPGs, and especially endemic in 4th Edition D&D and probably in 5th Edition, too.

That post is about “support roles” and how there’s a push to “fix” them.  It mentions games like City of Heroes, Team Fortress 2, and then Dungeons and Dragons.  The idea if that there are “primary” classes and “support” classes, where primary classes are defined by their ability to “solo” the game, and support classes are more indirect and make their team mates “feel more awesome.”  These games, though, have tended towards balancing support classes so that they can make a better direct showing in combat, to the detriment of their ‘support’ abilities.

As I said in my (excruciatingly-long-in-hindsight) comment over there, this is appropriate for games like TF2 and CoH.  Those games have a somewhat static ecology to work with and a default engagement method — namely, “kill all of the things.”  Because of this, classes are measured by how well they can contribute to combat.  TF2 is a team game by default so there’s room for a bit more specialization (compare Heavy vs Sniper vs Engineer). MMOs like CoH and World of Warcraft assume team play (on some level) but don’t enforce it; players will occasionally not want or be able to find a group, and so either all classes can make some measure of progress alone or they risk a stale experience (and losing customers).

If we’re honest with ourselves, I think we’d have to admit that D&D began life with a similar default of “kill all of the things,” but at the time there was more emphasis on “and take their stuff,” than on the killing.  I’m told that OD&D gave out experience points for every piece of gold you found, which would encourage <i>avoiding</i> fights if it means (1) you could get (most of) the treasure any ways, and (2) it let you save resources so you could kill more things later (and take their stuff).  Regardless, D&D definitely grew from there to the point where, in D&D 3.X, combat may have been common and expected, but it wasn’t the only approach to the game.  Knowledge, skills, and personality could get you places that a sword and a strong arm couldn’t (depending on your DM and what kind of game you were playing). Characters don’t need to shine in combat so long as they can shine somewhere else, and I think that’s a great strength that tabletop RPGs have over (most) video games.  If the rogue or wizard was terrible in combat that was fine, because the fighter would be useless when a trap had to be disarmed or some ancient runes needed to be deciphered.  If the men-at-arms characters could handle the combat the others were free to hang back, and they’d get their spotlight with other challenges.

One of the most common complaints about 4E (in my experience) is hat it essentially threw away decades of legacy for the “new hotness” of MMOs.  Personally I think there’s some truth in that, but (1) I think it’s the natural result of forces that began acting long ago and (2) for what it was I don’t think they did a bad job.  The thing is that years before 4th Edition became a thing, D&D players and designers got caught up focusing on Combat and aiming for Balanced Encounters.  Fourth Edition really just codified that in the system; for better or worse, it’s something we did to ourselves.

To that point, though, I’d say it’s “for worse.”  Fourth and Fifth Edition both seem to assume that combat is the default method of engagement and everyone should contribute to it equally (or at least consistently).  It’s forcing a homogenization that I think is bad for the game and for the hobby. Tactical miniatures are fun games (I play Warhammer 40K myself, when I get a chance), but they’re different from RPGs and they satisfy different desires.  ‘Fixing’ the classes and the systems so that everyone acts like a Wizard and fights like a Fighter limits the hobby, and frankly other games do those things better already.

Broken Crafts

I decided to start this blog when it occurred to me (thanks in great part to Justin from The Alexandrian) that the majority of the difficulty and frustration I’d experienced as a GM was due to the fact that I didn’t have all the tools necessary to run a complete game.  The Hexcrawl was and remains the missing structure that I’m most interested in (mainly because exploration was the most interesting and least supported facet of the game), but there are also a number of broken structures that I want to repair or replace.  High on that list is the system for Crafting.

Here I’m talking about the Pathfinder/D&D3.X system for the Crafting Skill, since that’s the system I use.  Amusingly, Justin Alexander used the Craft Skill as a basis for his Calibrating Expectations post, which has been foundational to my paradigm shift.  And for the purposes of that article I think the system works out pretty well — as Justin demonstrates, a skilled Blacksmith performs roughly as would be expected under the system.  But when I looked closer at the skill (prompted by my desire to run a game where PCs started off as smiths, coopers, masons, and other Craft-based professions) it seemed to break down rather quickly.  In particular, it struck me that the system is such that, all else being equal, items with a higher DC are easier to craft.

Here’s how 3.X Crafting works: find the item’s price in Silver (where 1 gp = 10 sp), then find the item’s DC based on it’s type (a table is provided at the SRD).  Collect raw materials equal to 1/3 the cost of the finished product, then make a roll each week to determine progress on the project.  Failing by 4 or less is simply no progress; failing by 5 or more ruins the project and half of the raw materials (apparently regardless of how much progress you’ve made).  On a success, multiply the check result by the DC and record the number; it it’s equal to the cost-in-silver, you’re done; if it’s equal to 2 or 3 times the cost in silver, you’re done in half or one-third the time (etc).  If it’s below the cost-in-silver you make more checks in following weeks until you reach that threshold.

I like crunching numbers, and when I started chewing on this one it stopped making sense.  There are three components to the formula: the cost-in-silver, the creation DC, and the skill roll, or Success=Cost/(DC*Roll).  Given the timescale we’re working on (measured in weeks by default) it seems to me that you’re never going to need to do anything but Take 10, so everything here is actually a constant, not a variable.  So, let’s pick it apart.  If cost goes up and the rest is constant, then it takes longer to create the item — that seems reasonable.  If the roll (our Take 10 result) goes up and the rest is constant, it takes less time — so a more-skilled worker gets the job done faster; that makes sense, too.  But if the DC goes up — if it’s HARDER to create — and the rest stays constant, it takes LESS time.  That is: a simple item that costs 200 silver and has a DC of 5 will take more time (apparently 4 times as long) as a complex item that costs 200 silver and has a DC of 20.

Now, I’ll admit: there’s nothing published (that I’m aware of) that costs 20gp and would qualify as a simple item (the example given in the Skill table being a spoon).  And in fact, it seems that generally higher-DC items cost more gold, so the decrease in time from a high DC is probably offset by an increase in time from the cost.  But I can tell you that a Heavy Pick (12gp, DC 15) is likely to take less time to craft than a Morningstar (12gp, DC12).  Is it a big difference?  Does it make sense?  I don’t know.  But I do know that it’s counter-intuitive that higher DCs make for shorter crafting times.

On top of that, this system is completely different from the rules for crafting Magical items.  For magic items, it takes 1 day per 1000gp (or fraction thereof), and a single roll is made (usually Spellcraft) to determine success at the end of the process.  To compare, progressing by 1000gp in a day for Crafting an item would require a (Roll*DC)/7 equal to 10,000, or a DC 7000 if we assume a roll of 10 (requiring a bonus of +6990).  Since a lot of the magic item’s value has to do with magic and not crafting per se, maybe that makes sense.  But the systems aren’t even similar.

I haven’t found a good fix to this issue, and so far I haven’t had a strong motivation to work one up — players don’t generally want to spend time crafting items.  But I think that fact in itself is a god reason to want to get a better system in place, so that crafting things can be a desirable thing to do.

Drowning In Content

Just a quick update.  I got in to a bad habit with the blogs I read that I’m trying to dig myself out of.  There are a load of good D&D/RPG blogs out there, a handful of which are listed in my blogroll to the left there. I actually follow several dozen blogs, some that are more prolific than others, some that are more pertinent than others.  But I’m also trying to catch up on the archives of a bunch of these blogs, too, to help fuel the commentary and (most importantly) toolbox of game structures that I’m trying to build here.  At first  thought I could just flag things “to read” and get to them when time allowed, but that’s resulted in my being buried under an ever-increasing pile of posts to read.  I’m trying to dig myself out by breaking them up in different categories (GM Tips, Hobby Thoughs, 5th Edition, etc), but it’s slow going.  I’m hoping I don’t have to simply abandon these archives, but we’ll see if I can get it under control.

On that note, actually, if any of you know of good posts (especially posts about “here’s a system to address X”), I’m open for suggestions.

The Next D&D N5xt

Mike Mearls has an article up talking about the survey feedback they got from the first round of open playtesting for D&D 5E, and what that means for the next round.

As I’m writing this, it strikes me: why am I writing this?  I’ve pretty much already decided that 5th Edition isn’t going to be for me.  At best I’ll riffle through 5E’s pockets for a few nice ideas, but it’s unlikely that they’re going to make a system that serves me better than 3.X or Pathfinder, and certainly not the way they’re heading right now.  Everything about 5E strikes me as “wonky”, so why bother spending more time on it?

I think the answer is: D&D, and role-playing in general, is something I’m passionate about.  I want to see it done well, and so I can’t help but engage in this dialog (such as it is).  D&D 5E probably won’t become something I want, but if I don’t participate it definitely won’t.  It’s still probably a futile exercise, but…

Anyways, go ahead and read Mearls’ article, I’m going to go through and address his points.

I do think they’re on to something with speed of play, though that may just be in light of the slow pace of modern gaming, and D&D 4E in particular.  It strikes me that the way we play modern systems (regardless of the rules system) tends to bog things down with options and analysis and so on.  The playtest rules at least feel a little more “fast and loose,” so I’ll give them credit for that.  I think most people had positive responses for (Dis)Advantage because they haven’t grasped the full implications of the mechanic.  I’ve all-but decided that I’m strongly opposed to it, myself – not because I think it’s a bad idea, but because I don’t like the roll-twice-drop-one mechanic (and the way it’s math plays out alongside static bonuses).

I like the sounds of adding in combat options and different maneuvers.  I’m… intrigued by the thought of Facing rules.  In my gaming career I’ve never encountered anything like that, though the people I know who have rarely seem to have good things to say about it.  Too much book-keeping?  I don’t know.

Surprise (which was just -20 Initiative for those surprised) was actually something I really liked.  I might have changed it to, say, -15 or -10 so that it wasn’t quite as severe (the best you could do when surprised is a score equal to your DEX mod, and most of the time you’d have a negative score — which means you’re going after everyone on the other side for the entire battle).  I can see how the permanent loss of initiative could be frustrating over the period of a long battle.  Maybe make the -20 temporary?  Or have the surprised members just lose their first turn?  It’s something to think about.

Critical hits were automatic on a 20 and did max damage.  I guess I can see how that’s boring, but it’s also not far from the way things have always been.  I’m a fan of 3.X criticals (threat range, confirm roll, and 2x the roll) with my only real complaint being that a crappy roll can do less than a regular hit (been thinking about max damage+roll for my games).  I really don’t like auto-crit on a 20; it means that 1 in 20 swings will be a critical, regardless of how easy or tough your opponent is.   like confirm rolls because it means 1 in 20 *hits* will be a critical, and that’s a bigger number for weak foes and a smaller number for tough ones.

They’re still interested in getting rid of skill points, and I can kind of understand that.  I think it’s a mistake, but I can understand it.  The idea of having training replace your attribute mod instead of enhancing it is interesting, but it means that training is less useful for someone who’s attributes SHOULD make them good at it.  So a character with a -2 mod is just as good with training as the guy with a +3 mod.  That doesn’t feel right.

Resting and Healing is where I had some of the biggest issues with the playtest.  He doesn’t really say much, except that it sounds like they want to put out different sets of rules depending on how gritty you want your game.  when it comes down to it, THAT is one of the things I dislike the most about the way they’re approaching 5E.  If I get together with friends to play 4E or Pathfinder or OSRIC, there’s a reasonable expectation that we all understand the system we’re going to be playing with, with a bit of variance for house rules and preferences.  With D&D 5E, though, the ASSUMPTION going in is that you can drastically change the rules system, and so it strikes me that there will have to be a negotiation each time a group forms — and when I say that, I mean more of a negotiation than “do we want to play 4E or 3.X?  Each time a new campaign starts there will need to be a discussion as to whether we’re using Themes, or Facing Rules, or High Lethality, and when someone tells invites me to their 5E game, I need ask, “well, which 5e?”

The one thing he does say definitively is more than a little concerning for me: they want to move Healing magic out of the spellcasting system and into a theme or something so that Clerics can heal *and do something else* each round, be it heal and attack, or heal and cast a spell, or whatever.  This concerns me because it’s essentially the biggest tactical failing of 4th Edition.  Tactical Healing works best when it’s a choice you need to make, like taking any other defensive move rather than an offensive one.  By allowing a Cleric to do healing and attacks at the same time, there’s no trade off.  Healing becomes assumed (because why would you not choose to heal, if it’s essentially free), and in becoming assumed it becomes necessary.  Now instead of having Cleric (or at least, Healer) as an option, it’s a staple that every party needs to have in order to be successful.

If you don’t want to be a Healer, don’t be a Healer.  If you don’t want all Clerics to be Healers, we’ve already begun to address that.  But if we take away the tactical cost of healing we lose the ability to choose to have it or not.

Associating Powers, Or Not

An update on my attempt to “fix” Fourth Edition.  After my last post where I posit an abstract system of “energy” that you can use to power Encounter or Daily powers, it was pointed out to me than not all powers are created equally.  A character might have a three Encounter Powers, but they’ll be Level 1, Level 2, and Level 4 (or whatever progression they have; it’s been a while since I looked at my 4E PHB).  So while my system would try to treat them equally, it’s probable that a player would always use their Level 4 power three times in every encounter, and never use their Level 1 power.  That strikes me as kind of a problem.

A possible solution was that I could give characters a numerical amount of energy based on their level, and then charge different amounts for a Level 4 Encounter Power versus a Level 1 Encounter Power (and do the same for Dailies).  The problem is that this adds a lot more book keeping than I wanted, and now I need to worry a lot more about relative balance (why would I ever use my Level 8 Daily if I can use my Level 4 Encounter four times for the same cost, etc).

I haven’t totally given up on the project, but it has taken a back seat to a number of other things vying for my attention. Hopefully I’ll be able to think hard about it again relatively soon (and maybe open my books to see exactly how uneven we’re talking…).

By What Measure An Armor Class?

I’ve been thinking about WotC’s new “bounded accuracy” idea a lot lately.  The long and short of it is that I don’t like it.  On face value it solves a problem (scaling bonuses and DCs don’t mean anything) that we created ourselves when we stopped letting 5th Level Adventurers encounter a 10th Level Roper.  We developed a fetish for ‘balanced encounters’ and, yes, when you scale monsters and obstacles to the party’s level, monsters and obstacles will scale to the party’s level.  The answer is to stop scaling to the party’s level; then the whole thing goes away.  Let the players experience things they can’t overcome, and then show them the same thing when they can overcome it and the sense that level advancement is pointless goes away.  But it means showing players Really Hard encounters and Really Easy encounters all the time. It means setting DCs based on actual properties of the obstacle, not on how big the character’s bonus is (or should be).

Building appropriate DCs is actually pretty easy.  Once you have the right notion of what the D&D system is supposed to model, you can get an objective sense of how hard things are.  DC 20 isn’t “the DC that’s hard for 3rd Level Adventurers,” it’s “the difficulty of performing master-quality work.”  And you can do this because you can break down what a character’s bonuses mean.

The catch is combat.  At least, that’s the hook I’ve been stuck on since i started chewing on this issue.  Deconstructing to-hit bonuses is still pretty straightforward.  If you’re stronger you can swing your sword better, faster, more accurately, so Strength plays a factor.  There’s a practical limit to strength (there’s an old Roles Rules and Rolls post that equates STR scores with “strength of n men”), and it’s based off a measurable quality of a creature.  There’s also equipment to consider (since masterwork or Magic weapons can help score a telling blow), and lastly there’s training — which is represented as Base Attack Bonus and goes up based on level and class.  if you have a complaint about the rate that BAB increases that might be a valid argument to make, but the system models several (fairly distinct, I think) tiers of adventuring, and there’s a hard limit on BAB within a tier (the best you can do is be a Fighting Man and get +Level).

Fantastic Racism

There’s a couple of posts on here right now discussing Race in D&D.  On the one hand we have a discussion of Race As Class, and more recently I tried to address the issue of races that are Always Chaotic Evil. Both of these issues are hold-overs from the origins of D&D, probably inherited from Chainmail and now warped to some extent or another due to lack of context and the evolution of the game. So right off, I’d have to concede that both are probably a matter of taste to some extent, and your mileage may vary.  That being said, I think both issues stem from a common source, and I intend to demonstrate why it’s not a patently absurd notion.

In that latter post a commenter suggested that my argument is only a partial answer to the question of racial stereotypes in D&D, and that there are plenty of things to consider — like, what about an industrious tribe of Goblins?  What about a group of Orcs who built a sprawling metropolis and discuss philosophy in amphitheaters?  For that matter, what about hyper-industrialist elves carving a swath of devastation across the land in their all-consuming drive to produce and consume?

When it comes down to it, I think this is all a question of whether all fantasy races are just humans in funny hats or not. That is, are we all just the same at a fundamental level, or are there actual differences that are simply inherent in the races.  Why are goblins erratic and lazy?  Because that’s part of what being a goblin is.  You might as well ask why fire burns.  Maybe they fatigue easily, maybe they have some other biological quirk that makes focus and productivity difficult or impossible.  Maybe their neural chemistry produces a different kind of perception, in the end it doesn’t matter how deep you go or what kind of explanation you give, the final question you have to ask is: are goblins (or orcs or elves) just the same as humans, or not?  If the answer is “no, they’re just the same as humans” that might be a valid setting to play in, but I feel like you lose a lot of the potential that Fantasy brings us as a genre.  And if the answer is “no, they’re different from humans somehow” then at some level that’s your answer — goblins are like goblins because they’re different from humans.  You can go on to discuss the hows and whys behind that answer, and I could see a whole campaign built around an adventuresome researcher trying to understand the various Races, but in the end the question is already answered.

So, my goblins are lazy, my orcs are brutal, my elves are arrogant.  Some goblins may be clever, some orcs may be honorable, and some elves may be benevolent — there may be whole tribes of each of these — but there is something fundamental that makes them goblins, orcs, and elves and asking why they don’t behave like humans is partly missing the point.

The (Dis)Advantaged

So there’s a lot of talk about the Advantage/Disadvantage mechanic that’s been put forward in the D&D N5xt playtests.  The basic idea is that when you have favorable circumstances on a roll (most cases I’ve seen people address it as an Attack roll, but it also applies to skill checks and possibly even saving throws) you have Advantage and you roll two d20s and keep the highest.  If circumstances are against you (tactically outmaneuvered, or maybe makeshift tools for picking a lock) you have Disadvantage and roll two d20s and keep the lower score.

A little bit ago, Roles, Rules, and Rolls proposed that this really just comes down to a bonus or penalty of about 3.325 or so, on average.  He also noted that  it’s the effect over the range that matters most, with effectively a +5 at even odds tapering down to minimal benefit (or penalty) for extreme rolls of 1 or 2, 19 or 20.  He concluded that it was simple and elegant, and had an “old school” feel.

Just recently I was directed to The Online GM‘s take on the same issue, at about the same time.  But unlike RR&R, The Online DM compared Advantage and Disadvantage to other similar mechanics, like the flat -2 for being prone, or +2 for Flanking.  He notes that in the mid ranges (where he admits most of D&D lives), (dis)advantage is giving you a swing of +4 or +5, which is huge compared to the older mechanics.  At the same time, (dis)advantage has very little effect on the extreme ranges (as noted) — basically, Advantage makes even odds a lot more likely, but generally leaves hard tasks hard; similarly, Disadvantage makes even odds a lot less likely, but generally keeps easy things easy.

Critical Hits follows a very similar line and plots out 2d20 versus a flat +2 bonus, and shows that the +2 bonus out-performs 2d20 at the extremes (and makes a 21 or 22 even possible).  Then he plots out +3, +4, and +5 and shows a sort of pyramid pattern, with 2d20 out-performing flat bonuses in the mid ranges and losing effectiveness toward the extremes.  That is to say, flat bonuses favor longshots more than Advantage (flat penalties potentially hurt more than Disadvantage) — and in fact, bonuses make otherwise impossible targets (like a DC25) possible and Advantage doesn’t (similarly, Disadvantage makes a DC20 unlikely, but even a -1 penalty makes DC20 impossible).

Finally, the crux of what’s picking at my brain right now, Campaign Mastery takes a look at the patterns beneath all of this, the curved progression of bonuses that 2d20 gives, with plus or minus (almost) 25% when the target is 11 down to plus or minus 5% at the edges.  Then he plots that against a graph of target-numbers-based-on-to-hit-bonuses and comes to a number of potent conclusions, the most important of which seems to be this: as your bonus goes up, the effect of either Advantage or Disadvantage goes down.  If you’re sufficiently skilled, neither Advantage nor Disadvantage are going to affect your odds much.  If you have a high enough AC, you don’t need to worry about being in a tactically Disadvantaged position (because you’ll still be just as hard to hit).  If you have a high enough skill, you don’t need to care much about favorable conditions (because the benefit will be marginal).  Campaign Mastery concludes that this is an effective foil to min-maxing, and maybe it is, but something about it strikes me wrong.

tl;dr

So what’s the bottom line?  I’m not really sure; the math of 2d20 still feels really wonky to me, and adding in flat bonuses as well makes it even more so.  I’m trying not to think too hard about how it might interact with the notion of bounded accuracy.

I think it can be summed up as follows:

• Advantage makes easy tasks guaranteed, moderate tasks easy, and difficult tasks are still difficult
• Disadvantage makes difficult tasks very difficult, moderate tasks difficult, and easy tasks are still easy
• (Dis)Advantage doesn’t make impossible tasks possible, or hard tasks impossible, the way flat bonuses and penalties do
• (Dis)Advantage matters progressively less the better you get, meaning that as you improve in skill your tactics and circumstances mean less — so paradoxically, a good Fighter benefits less from good tactics.

In the end, I’m not sure how I feel about the mechanic.  It may be I just prefer the devil I know, and I don’t trust this new mechanic which seems difficult to understand by comparison.  I know that a +2 bonus gives be a flat +10% likelihood.  I really have no idea on a case-by-case basis what Advantage gets me, or how much Disadvantage hurts.  And like I’ve mentioned elsewhere, uncertainty and inconsistency are not things I find endearing in a system.

On The Moral Compass

I feel like I’ve been talking about alignment a lot lately. Maybe it’s just me.

There’s a post today at Wizards of the Coast’s D&D Website about how every group needs a moral compass “to remind his or her adventuring companions that they’re heroes.”  I would tend to disagree — there are some play styles and some campaigns where having a moral compass might be useful or encouraged, but I think it’s a stretch to say that every group needs a moral compass.  After all, who ever said that the PCs have to be “heroes”?

There was a time when I would have agreed with the WotC article, when I would have shaken my fist and said “yes, that’s what my group needs.”  In those days, I developed campaigns not unlike movie screenplays or novel outlines, and a lot of the time my players messed it up.  They wouldn’t go where I wanted them to go, they wouldn’t act the way I wanted them to act.  I found myself building barriers to discourage the “wrong” choices and trying to suss out what kind of sticks or carrots I could use to get my players to go the “right” direction.  Did they want money, or glory, or fame?  Could I kidnap a family member, or threaten them with the King’s Justice if they didn’t obey?  Those were very stressful times for me, and I’ve been moving slowly but steadily away from them.

The point is, an adventuring group only needs a moral compass if there are wrong choices for them to make.  And more and more, I feel that framing things so that any choice can be wrong kind of misses the point of Role Playing.  Sure, if you have a certain style of game you want to play — say a heroic quest where the PCs fight against the Big Bad Evil Guy — then there are guidelines you need to set down so that everyone (including the DM) has fun with the game.  But the heart of Role Playing is making choices based on who your character is, and for me the best role playing is when your character has to make a tough choice — and that usually requires the character to choose between Good and Evil in some way.  If the going-in assumption is that Evil is always the “wrong” choice, then there’s no choice at all.

In my games, all choices have consequences.  All choices change the world in some way, and that change will come back to affect the characters in some way.  Good acts will sometimes have negative consequences, sometimes doing bad things makes achieving your goals easier.  Players are free to choose to be the Heroes, and that can be awesome and fulfilling, but if my players want to fracture the party and raise armies against each other, I think that should be just as valid.  If players choose to be villains we should let them, and they should reap the benefits and consequences of their actions regardless of what those actions are.

Always Chaotic Evil

I had a conversation about alignments yesterday, and in particular the problem of “monster” races, and how such-and-such race is “always chaotic evil.”  I agreed that this was a problem, that things would be different in my games, that it shouldn’t be reasonable that a Lawful Good Paladin slaughters an entire village of sentient (if ugly) creatures without a twinge of guilt.

Now, in my system of alignment, “evil” isn’t evil, per se.  It could be argued that none of the traditional labels are particularly good fitsBut then we actually started talking about specific races, what the differences are between goblins, hobgoblins, and orc; what their cultures were like.  I started saying things like, “goblins are scavengers; they’re frenetic and lazy and they take things rather than build them.”  “Hobgoblins are militaristic and expansionist, more like an army than a society; they constantly seek to expand and subjugate other nations.” “Orcs are a brutal, tribal people who function on a ‘might makes right’ basis.”  So even if “evil” just means “willing to actively hurt others to achieve your goals,” aren’t all of these — goblins, hobgoblins, and orcs — simply evil creatures?  What would a good goblin look like?

As with my concept of alignment generally, I think the answer is a complicated one full of nuance.  I think that these societies that I’ve outlined are evil, and I think that being in that environment will tend individual members towards a matching alignment — after all, my notion of alignment is essentially short hand for characters’ values, and people derive at least some of their values from their society.  But just like I can envision a Lawful Good villain doing terrible things because “it’s for the best,” I can see a Good goblin who’s no less inclined to go raid a neighboring settlement.  In a way, both come down to rationalization, and if either one thinks too hard on it they might find themselves conflicted, wracked with guilt, or even choosing to change their alignment.  An Evil goblin raids a neighbor because he can, because he wants what they have, and he doesn’t care if (or possibly looks forward to) others get hurt in the process.  A Good goblin raids a neighbor because he has too, because they have things that his community needs, and he would rather (or possibly acts to ensure) nobody gets hurt in the process.  Both of them are raiding their neighbors and potentially having violent confrontations, but they have different reasons and different attitudes.

In the end, the point is that societies have an identity and alignment that is composed of but also more than the identity and alignment of their individual members.  Could there be a whole tribe of Lawful Good goblins who respect tradition and honor and don’t like hurting others?  Sure, but they’ll probably still raid their neighbors, because they’re frenetic and lazy.

Hitting the Target

One thing that I’m undecided about is D&D N5xt’s “bounded accuracy” idea.  As I mentioned a little bit ago, I’m generally not a fan of it.  It strikes me as an unnecessary “solution” to a problem we have created for ourselves. (That problem being that as characters gain levels and improve Skill bonuses and To-Hit bonuses, the creatures they face have higher AC and the challenges we give them have higher DCs, so it’s all a wash.)  We created it when we stopped basing the mechanics off the world (that’s a really difficult cliff to climb, so DC 18) and started basing the world off the mechanics (characters at this level will have a +4 to climb, so for this to be a challenge is needs a DC 18).  If you stop doing that, if you let characters encounter a world that has both trivial and impossible obstacles, then the fact that they get higher bonuses matters.

That being said… while we have a general notion of what DCs mean in terms of skill and talent and success, it seems to me that we don’t have anything similar for modeling AC and to-hit bonuses.  This is particularly meaningful to me because I think combat may be the one place where bounded accuracy could make sense.  I’m not convinced it does make sense, but it could.  With skill checks, that cliff will always be a DC18 cliff, but if it’s windy, rainy, icy, and so on you might take penalties to your Climb check, and so having higher and higher bonuses is meaningful because not only can you succeed at Really Hard Things, but you can succeed even in non-ideal conditions.  How can the same things translate to combat?

Mearls’ Ask Me Anything

Mike Mearls, the guy in charge of D&D N5xt, did an Ask Me Anything over at Reddit.  I didn’t get a chance to ask the one question I’m curious about — that is, have they considered not making a 5th Edition — but Blog of Holding has a run-down of some of the answers Mearls gave that hint at new mechanics they’re considering for the game.  More and more I’m thinking I’ll take a pass on D&D N5xt and just cherry pick their best ideas to add as houserules to systems I do like.

Associating Powers

One of the things that bothers me the most when it comes to 4th Edition D&D is how difficult many of the mechanics (and descriptions of those mechanics) make it for me to envision the situation.  A lot of the mechanics make the world seem inconsistent, and that makes it difficult for my to really portray my character. And one of the key offenders is the Attack and Utility Powers characters get.

Ostensibly, each class is based off of a given ‘power source,’ be it Magic, Divine, Primal, Psionic, Shadow, or Martial.  Each class then learns a number of At-Will, Encounter, and Daily powers.  At-Will powers can be used whenever the character wants, Encounter powers can be used once before needing a 5-minute “short rest” to recharge, and Daily Powers can be used only once before needing an 8-hour “long rest” to recharge.  This system easily lends itself to balancing classes against each other, and it’s nominally straight forward to envision using up energy to perform these feats and then needing to ‘recharge,’ not unlike a video game.  The problem is that the system breaks down if you inspect it from the point of view of the characters; this is especially problematic for Martial characters who, traditionally, don’t have a consumable pool of energy.

For example, one of the rogue’s daily powers lets him inflict the target with a bleeding wound.  Why is this something he can only do once a day?  The answer is “because of game balance” (I’m told 4E had a very top-down design, starting with desired effects and then moving to probable causes) but that has no meaning to the character.  It becomes a dissociated mechanic that the player has to make choices on but that the character can’t make choices on.

The first adjustment I want to make to 4th Edition is changing the way Powers work so that they can more meaningfully be translated into terms the characters can understand and reason on.

What Would Jorgin the Bold Do?

I recently read a rather long post by The Angry DM discussing the question “what is Role Playing?”  Angry got a bit irritated by stock phrases like “role playing means different things to different people” and the notion that role playing and dice are mutually exclusive (or at least at odds with each other).  Angry notes that long before Gygax and Crew created their spin-off of Chainmail “role playing” was an actual term with actual meaning.

Angry goes through several pages of discussion (and I think it’s all good stuff), but his thoughts basically boil down to a few key points.

• Role Playing is the process of envisioning a situation, putting yourself into the place of one of the characters, and then making a decision on what that character would do.  If you’re imagining a scene and deciding what your character would do, you’re role playing.
• All the other bits that we associate with role playing, including speaking in character and describing actions, are good aids for role playing, but they’re really just presentation.  They help the other players understand the new situation that comes about once your character has acted, but they aren’t  necessary to role playing as such.  Someone who narrates rather than monologues is role playing just as much as anyone else.
• There are two classes of role playing — ‘weak’ role playing, where the decision you make would be made the same way and for the same reasons regardless of what character you’re portraying (buying an item at $30 instead of $60); and ‘strong’ role playing, where the decision you make is heavily based on the personality of the character you’re portraying, and often involves resolving an internal conflict (wanting two mutually exclusive things, or not wanting either of two options).
  • “Weak” and “strong” are not meant to signify “bad” and “good” roleplaying, it’s just a matter of how dependent on the character your choices are.  Angry notes that in some cases, such as combat, weak role playing can be very appropriate, as people trained for high stress situations fall into predictable routines.
  • Angry also notes that this doesn’t preclude combat from having strong role play opportunities — the Elf Fighter who engages the Orc opponent, heedless of his party or other considerations, because he has an intense hatred for Orcs, is making a strong role playing decision.

This whole discussion struck a chord with me because (as with many posts I read relating to our hobby) it gave me words for considerations that I didn’t have before.  It would often bother me when, having asked my players what their character’s attitude or opinion on a thing was, they would respond with “why should I have to know that?” or “why should I decide that now?” or “I just want to develop my character through play.”  I’ll acknowledge that developing characters in play is valid (and honestly expected), but I can now say why the lack of a clear understanding of my player’s characters bothers me: I yearn for strong role play, where characters are presented with difficult choices to make and internal conflicts to resolve.  That is exceedingly difficult to achieve as a GM if I can’t get a view on what my player characters care about, or fear, or whatever.

I don’t have a good fix to the issue (I still desire answers and my players still resist providing them) but at least I know what’s going on and can begin to address it constructively.

Adjusting 4E

When all is said and done, 4th Edition is what finally brought me in to the D&D fold.  It made the game approachable in a way that bad DMs and years of textbooks to catch up on never did.  I was repelled by it’s flaws pretty quickly and fell in with Pathfinder and (to a much lesser extent) the OSR movement, but I still owe 4E some credit.  I also have a number of friends (including my wife) who came on board with 4E and don’t feel as strongly about it’s flaws as I do, so I’ve decided to put effort into “fixing” the system so I don’t find it so repellant.  I’ll be collecting those house rules on a new Page I’ve created, and probably adjusting my adjustments as I find what works and what doesn’t.

A lot of this is based off of comments made on Dissociated Mechanics, Defining Your Game, and the Dual Faces of Healing, probably some other sources and influences as well.  Right now I only have a few beginning notions of what I think I need to fix, and the barest notion of how to fix them.  Thoughts and feedback are welcome.

Energy Sources : All classes in 4E have an energy source, not unlike characters in Diablo 3, but it’s a rather informal, dissociated thing.  I’d like to clean that up, and make it reasonable that a Fighter only gets 3 Encounter powers every 5 minutes, and 2 Dailies each day.

Energy Conversion: Related to Energy Sources, I feel like there should be some notion of converting between Encounter energy and Daily energy.  It’s all effectively Mana or Focus or Fatigue, just bigger or smaller chunks, you should be able to give up a Daily to recharge Encounters, or forgo your encounters to fire off an extra Daily, right?

Power Through Pain: So what happens when you’re out of Energy?  You just can’t do anything but basic moves?  I think I want to have a mechanic where characters can overexert themselves if they’ve expended all their energy, perhaps Fatiguing, Exhausting, or Damaging themselves as they push their body beyond what’s “safe”.

Tactical Healing: I think that there’s generally way too much healing available in combat, and it’s rarely done in a way that forces a tactical choice.  I’d like a way to change that, and preferably something better than individual errata on ever Cleric power.

Recovery: Recovery between encounters is something that I also feel there’s way too much of; there’s little sense of lasting consequences from poorly chosen or poorly executed plans.  I’d like to scale that back and make recovery available and reliable, but not necessarily instantaneous.

Flattening Trees

So in general  like the idea of feats, I think that they’re implemented poorly in D&D 3.X and Pathfinder — especially as you go into the later splatbooks and such, feats become worse and worse in my perspective, both in terms of power creep and in terms of carving off things anyone should be able to do and making it a feat. In general, I think there are three things that a feat should be allowed to do: take away a penalty (as with Precise Shot and shooting in to Melee), give a bonus (as with Point-Blank Shot and targets within 30ft), or allow an action that’s normally impossible (such as Versatile Channeling). A feat that adds an effect to an action (like Stand Still) is effectively giving a bonus, and a feat that lets you perform certain complex actions (such as Bounding Hammer) is probably just removing a penalty (ie, you could attempt to bounce hammers off foes without the feat but at a high penalty). I intend to eliminate or greatly alter feats that I feel simply allow an action that anyone should be able to take (I’m thinking especially of Power Attack and I suspect there are others).

Aside from pruning the trees, I also intend to flatten them.  There are a number of feats that are chained together with prerequisites that don’t necessarily matter, and this needlessly prevents effective use of Feats to specialize and customize characters.  Why should you have to learn how to shoot accurately at close range before firing at extreme range?  And why does a character have to be 7th Level before they can gather followers? I’m not sure that last should even be a Feat (especially when it seems that it was rather fundamental in older versions of D&D).

In order to decouple chains and flatten trees in a meaningful way, though, we need to understand what the current requirements are, what those requirements represent, and whether that’s a meaningful requirement to have.  A lot of this relies on my understanding of the intent of the 3.X system (which Pathfinder is based on).

D&D Next Reactions

I’ve been putting off writing a D&D Next post, partly because I still feel like I haven’t fully digested the materials, partly because my group only got a half-hearted playtest in, and partly because I’ve been interested in pursuing other things, like hexcrawl mechanics and fixing feats.  On Friday, though, my post on DCs got mentioned on Friday Knight News, and I figured I should go ahead and address 5E directly. (As an aside, the FKN posts look to be neat aggregate posts, and I think I’ll keep a closer eye on Game Knight Reviews generally, as some neat thoughts are floating around there.)

So, what are my thoughts on 5E?  Firstly: this. This a thousand times.  I don’t think anyone wants or needs a 5th Edition, and the genesis of one is something of an ill-conceived reaction to the fact that 4E lost a lot of players and Retro-clones and Pathfinder has been eating WotC’s lunch for several years now.  The answer is not to give us another franken-system, the answer is to give us what we want, and produce new and updated material for the four systems everyone’s already playing.  We don’t all have to buy the same product, and WotC should be more concerned that we’re buying their product than which product we’re buying.  I’m no publishing industry insider, but it seems to me that the realities of publishing have changed a lot, and I for one would be likely to buy material for each D&D system if WotC would let me (ask my wife: I’m still buying 4E producats and I don’t even like that system).

Anyways.  On to the actual 5E stuff. It gets long.

On Race As Class

A long time ago, Classes in D&D were a lot different than we know them today.  My understanding, gleaned from no source more reliable than Wikipedia, is that the original D&D just had Fighter, Cleric, and Magic-User. The races were humans, dwarves, elves, and halflings, and the non-human races had restrictions on what classes they could choose (ie, there was no such thing as a Dwarf Magic-User or an Elf Cleric).  Then, the ‘Basic’ set of D&D added a few classes and shunted non-human races off into their own individual classes — there was no longer even “Elf Magic-User” there was just “Elf.”  the game gradually moved away from that to the duality of Race and Class as we know them today — race determines certain attribute bonuses and penalties, maybe some special abilities, but the bulk of the character is his Class, and the difference between a Human Fighter and an Elf Fighter is little more than “one has pointy ears, and on average will be more agile and frail.”

The argument has been made that the way we have things today is dumb because elves and dwarves and gnomes and so on are not just humans in funny hats.  They are, the argument goes, utterly alien beings that do not approach the world the way humans do, and anyone who says Race-as-Class is dumb is being unimaginative and a little racist.

The argument has also been made that Race-as-Class is dumb because it assumes that all individuals of a given race are formed from the same unbending mold, that each one that adventures does it in the same way without variation.  Anyone who says Race shouldn’t be separate from Class, the argument goes, is at best being obtuse, and probably a little racist.

All That You Hold Dear

One of the things that bothers me, that’s pervasive in the way adventures are written, the way PCs and NPCs are envisioned, and so on, is what appears to me to be a misinterpretation of Alignment.  I’ve done a lot of thinking on the subject, but for this post I did some extra research to make sure I got things right.  So first, an interesting little history lesson.

D&D, as many may know, stemmed from a tabletop wargame called Chainmail.  From what I know it was a lot like Warhammer or Warmachine.  Each player brings an army, you move them across the terrain and make hits against opposing units.  When one player achieves some goal (occasionally simply annihilation of the opposing forces) they win. Chainmail set itself up as a conflict between Law and Chaos, and individual units were aligned to one side or the other (or neutral) so a player could decide what sorts of units made sense to include in an army together.  It wasn’t about philosophy and morals so much as which side of an Epic Conflict you were on.  As was noted on Grognardia, at this point the alignments might as well have been “Romans” and “Gauls.”

On The Difficulty of Actions

The foundation of my new understanding of and appreciation for Dungeons and Dragons (especially at lower levels) is the Calibrating Your Expectations article from The Alexandrian.  The main focus of that article is showing the the D&D system is fairly robust in terms of modelling realism, and then dismantling the arguments that D&D can’t model someone like Einstein, or Conan, or Robin Hood, or [insert your hero here].  Justin (who writes The Alexandrian) noted later that most people walked away from that post with a new desire for low level play (not his intended outcome), and I count myself in that crowd.

Part of how Justin went about his argument for D&D’s system was to establish what a regular person under the system would be capable of.  He fished around in the DM Guide and found that most of the world — regular people — would have a standard attribute array of 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8 — only the top 5% would have an “Elite” array of 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8.  So in general, regular people are lucky to have a +1 bonus in an attribute.  Further down in the post he demonstrates how a 1st level artisan would conceivably have a +10 bonus on checks (+1 from attributes, +1 from skill ranks, +3 from class-skill bonus, +3 from skill focus feat, and +2 from an apprentice).  With a +10 bonus, a character has about a 55% chance to meet DC 20, or if they’re unhurried they can Take 10 and meet DC 20 every time. Since this lets the artisan Take 10 and create masterwork products, Justin declares it to be master of the art.

What we’re coming to at this point is a notion of “how hard is hard.”  early on in my DM career, deciding on DCs is something I really struggled with, and lacking and guidelines for what a DC 13 means compared to a DC 17 or (relatedly) how much of a penalty -4 on a check is, I found myself setting DCs based on whether I wanted my players to succeed or not (and rarely or never telling my players what the DC was, which I now think is a gross mistake).

To go back to the hard numbers, we can say that a talented, untrained person has a +1 on a check; a trained person would have a +4 or +5; and someone dedicated to the craft will have a +7 or +8.  Rolling a 10 or better on d20 is a 55% chance, while a 5 or better is roughly 80% and a 15 or better is 30%.  So a DC 18 check is something that has an even chance of success for someone dedicated to the craft, and is expected to fail for even trained practitioners.  That is to say, for most people a DC 18 is a hard task.  Conversely, a DC 11 check has a fair chance of success for anyone with a bit of talent, and basic training makes success likely (75% with a +5 bonus).  A DC 11 is an easy task. A -4 penalty, though, is enough to make something that’s normally a sure thing a dicey proposal.  A -8 is enough to shut down even masters of the art.

One of the things I was glad to see in the D&D Next playtest materials was a section in the DM Guidelines about DCs.  They listed DC 10 or lower as Trivial (usually not worth a check), DC 11-14 as Moderate (requires minimal competence), DC 15-18 as Advanced (requires expertise or assistance), DC 19-22 as Extreme (beyond the capabilities of most people without aid or exceptional ability), DC 23-26 as Master (only the most skilled even have a chance of success), and 27+ as Immortal (the realm of demigods).  I think the tiers work well with the 3rd Edition skills system (though I might dispute that DC 10 checks usually aren’t work it, unless “usually” is meant to stand for “any time you can Take 10).

(As an aside, Roles, Rules, and Rolls has a post from a week ago about how Disadvantage in 5E is roughly comparable to a -3 penalty, and thus serves a similar purpose as the -4 penalty; namely, moving a task one tier up in difficulty.)

On Why Archers Should Just Use Swords

So my group is having a bit of a problem with ranged combat.  Specifically, we’re finding again and again that ranged combat is not, generally, a viable option.  There are two rules which seem to always come up during combat that result in our archer not doing any useful for most of the encounter.

Here’s the typical situation: the group is wandering through the forest (or worse and more often, a dungeon).  The come upon a group of bandits, orcs, goblins, etc. — if they’re lucky the group doesn’t notice them or is far away.  In the case of a dungeon, though, neither of those is particularly likely.  If they’re lucky, the archer might have a round or two to fire a couple of shots, while the melee characters charge toward each other at about 120ft per round (unless either side is running, in which case it’ll be quicker).  In most cases, the opposing sides are in melee essentially immediately, and that’s where the game ends for the archer.

According to Pathfinder rules, if there’s anyone between you and your target, friend or foe, the target gets cover (a +4 bonus to AC).  Pathfinder also states that if you’re target is adjacent to  a friendly unit, you take a -4 penalty to hit as you avoid hitting your friend.  So when combat breaks out, the archer is now shooting at an effective -8 penalty.  The absurdity of this situation comes when you realize that the Fighter is now rolling against an AC 13 (triuvial for our low-level group) against the hide-clad orcs and the archer is rolling against an effective AC 21 (she might as well disengage from the game). If the orcs were much more armed at all, the archer would have no chance of hitting them.

So, I get that this is “realistic” and I agree that there should be considerations for both cover from creatures and the dangers of shooting into melee, but I think it should be done in such a way that it doesn’t destroy the fun for one of my players.  So I’m looking for a consistent rule or set of rules that I can apply that are less onerous than a -8 to hit.

There are a few options I’ve considered.  The first is to simple state that Cover and Shooting In To Melee don’t stack, the same that multiple sources of cover don’t stack (partial cover is -4 whether that partial cover is from one stone wall or three intervening creatures; however, Rules As Written cover is a bonus to AC and shooting into melee is a penalty to hit). A second option would be that cover from creatures is only a -2 cover bonus instead of the normal -4, since creatures don’t fill space the way a stone wall does. A third option (which comes from some OSR conversations I’ve seen) is that there’s no penalty for shooting in to melee, but if you miss you have a 2-in-6 or 3-in-6 chance that you hit an ally instead. (Though some note that if you just go one that, you might as well aim at your high AC ally since a miss means automatically hitting the enemy… but I think that’s gaming the system.) A variant of that that I thought of would be that a to-hit roll of natural 1-4 hits an ally, or you only check the 3-in-6 chance if you fail to hit the target’s Touch AC (even if the attack is still a “miss”).

I’m still trying to puzzle this out, but I think the solution I like the best is to lessen the cover bonus from creatures (in all situations) to +2 and to check for hitting an ally if you shoot in to melee and miss.  This way the Archer is still effective (only hitting at -2) but takes a risk when shooting in to melee, and has reason to switch to melee weapons herself (making it all a meaningful choice).

If you’ve got thoughts on the issue feel free to add them in the comments.

On Dissociated Mechanics

This is not a post by me; this is simply to redirect you to this rather brilliant article on The Alexandrian about Dissociated Mechanics, and their use and misuse in Role Playing Games.  This is particularly pertinent to me because (1) dissociated mechanics and an understanding of them are what propelled me from 4th edition (which drew me into D&D) and into the arms of Pathfinder and OSR; (2) this blog is about tools that can be used by Players and (especially) DMs to enhance role playing, and those tools need to take dissociation into consideration; and (3) as we’re collectively going over D&D 5E it is imperative that we understand dissociative mechanics because that was the great failing of 4th Edition and we need to make sure 5th doesn’t carry forward the same or similar mistakes.

On Wisdom

While I’m still slowly going through the 5E playtest materials, I’ve been looking around at what other people have to say about it.  Reading a couple of posts on The Alexandrian and Blog of Holding, it strikes me that 5E seems to be highlighting a misunderstanding by the system of the Wisdom attribute.

There are two things that 5E is doing that spotlights the problem, but I don’t think 5E is introducing the problem: it’s just making clear a problem that we’ve all been living with for years, though it’s been masked.  First,5E is dropping the triumvirate of 3E saving throws, Fortitude, Reflex, and Will.  Instead, saves are made directly based on attributes.  You’ll make Strength saves and Dexterity saves and Charisma saves, and so on.  I’m not exactly sure what an Intelligence Save might look like (the materials say “against spells that try to overcome your intellect, but I’m not sure what they mean) but it’s in there.

The Alexandrian is tentatively supportive of this change (as am I), but notes that it might introduce the old hierarchy of saves issue.  It used to be you saves were based on what a thing you were avoiding was (death, dragonfire, ray), and later it was based on how you avoid the thing (jump out of the way, take the hit and power through, resist with your will).  But there was a question on what Save to use if a thing fell in to multiple categories (a ray of death, or something you can dodge or resist with will) — do you use the best save, or the worst save, or just whatever save the DM cares to call for?  This was relieved a little bit in 3E, I think, but in 5E it looks like both Wisdom and Charisma are fighting over the same turf.  Wisdom saves are supposed to be used to resist being charmed or influenced (and it’s noted that both Command and Charm Person call for Wisdom saves), but Charisma saves are supposed to be used to resist  “magical compulsions.”

The second point is 5E seems to be tossing away the idea of skills, generally.  I may have misread it, but is you want to bust down a door you roll a Strength check, if you want to tumble to safety you roll a Dexterity check, if you want to search the room for traps you make a Wisdom check, and so on. Some character options give a bonus to certain actions (the Rogue character does note +3 to “open Locks”), and maybe there’s a more-robust skill system than we’re seeing here.  But from the looks of it, if you want to be good at finding secret doors, you bump up your Wisdom.

Blog of Holding notes that this highlights the odd position we find ourselves in when the Cleric (who’s whole schtick is based off Wisdom) is better at finding things than the Ranger, Rogue, or Barbarian (if you accept “feral awareness” or “aggression-fueled blindness”).  In 3E this issue was masked by the fact that skill points and Class training could make up for a poor Wisdom, but all things being equal a Cleric would have higher Perception because it was based on his key stat.  He goes on to suggest moving Perception in to Dexterity not because it makes any sense but because then the classes we expect to be perceptive (Rangers, Rogues) would have it keyed to their attribute of choice.

Frankly, I think that’s just silly.  Blog of Holding claims that Perception doesn’t really fit under any of the 6 attributes and while there might be an argument for that the description of Wisdom says it represents “common sense, awareness, and intuition.”  I this that’s something of a perfect fit for Perception.  Definitely better than an attribute representing manual dexterity and agility.

The problem in both cases is one little word in the description of Wisdom: “Wisdom describes a character’s willpower, common sense, awareness, and intuition.”  One of these is not like the others; one of these just doesn’t belong.  And in fact, I think the place that “willpower” does belong is under Charisma: “Charisma measures a character’s personality, personal magnetism, ability to lead” (the 5E text says “ability to influence others and strength of personality”).  Both of those lines were taken from the Pathfinder SRD, and I’m pretty sure it meshes with the 3E SRD as well.

So my solution is thus: move Willpower in to Charisma, with “strength of personality,” where it belongs. Make Wisdom a stat of pure awareness and intuition so it isn’t fighting with Charisma any more.  And adjust Clerics so that their magic is based off of Charisma (like 4E Paladins), representing the strong personality and will necessary to draw the power and favor of the gods (bonus: Clerics are now best able to draw followers). It cleans everything up just by dropping one word.

Intermission

So before the hex crawl that I did this weekend, I started working on a few of projects that should become posts when they’re done.  Turns out that there’s a bit more effort involved than I expected, especially since I didn’t touch any of it over the long weekend.

The first bit I’m working on is trying to address the issue of feats.  So far I’ve gone through the Pathfinder SRD and binned the feats into Tiers based on how many feat prerequisites they have — this roughly translates to “what is the earliest level this feat could be taken,” but not entirely (I haven’t accounted for Base Attack Bonus or Level requirements, for example).  even at that, easily half of the feats are simply unavailable to a 1st level character, and a good chunk are unavailable before 4th level.

The second bit is a review of the 5th Edition playtest materials that got released.  Other people are already going over their first impressions — The Alexandrian made a couple of comments that hadn’t occurred to me, such as “how much of an improvement on 3rd Edition can we expect” and the possibility of an infestation of disassociated mechanics.  I’ve only gone over the “How to Play” packet and skimmed the others; my initial thoughts are positive, but there are a few things I’m unsure about.  I may get my players to try to run through the playtest adventure with me this weekend and maybe that’ll help inform my opinion.

Finally, I’ve been toying with the idea of reducing character creation to a high-density blurb. It’s not a final solution and doesn’t produce a completed character but I think it should distill the necessary choices a player needs to make, and that will hopefully speed up character creation.  I think as it is it might only work for 1st level characters, and even at that some of my players have pointed out that I may have blind spots where my own expertise with the system makes things more intuitive for me than they are for others.

Go West, Young Man

This weekend, my brothers and I got together for the long weekend and I took the opportunity to try my hand at a hexcrawl game.  We had limited time to work with, so I told them to keep it basic and make characters with whatever background they wanted, as long as it gets them to this town looking for adventure in the wilderness.  The game itself was essentially the same idea as the Western Marches campaign I’ve heard about, though I’ve never read up on it specifically.  Adventure is to the west, retirement is to the east, and in the middle is a town you can spend your money at, brag about your adventures, and prepare for new ones.

Setting up the game took a lot of work on my part.  It’s the kind of work that’s done once and can be used over and over again, but as this was my first game it all had to be taken care of.  I used Hexographer to build my map, following the guidelines of Welsh Piper. I really wanted to use the one-page hexcrawl encounter system from Roles, Rules, and Rolls, but I didn’t have the time to hand-key even a significant portion of my hexmap, and I wanted to incorporate non-combat encounters. So instead I used a multi-table setup recommended by Pencils and Papers — I had a d20 table to determined if there was an encounter and what type, and then sub-tables for Combat, Location, Sub-Quest, and Special encounters.

Making those random tables took the bulk of my effort.  The Welsh Piper guidelines make building a hexmap really easy, and the Pathfinder core rules have a lot of information for how to put together encounters (so my Combat table had entries like “2d4+1 Goblin Warriors”), but I haven’t really found any good advice or suggestions on what a Random Encounter table should look like, especially not for non-Combat encounters.  Sub-Quests were probably the hardest, but possibly because (for time’s sake) I was restricting myself to one-line hooks.  “Lay the Dead to Rest,” “Explore the Ruins,” “Stop the Mad Wizard.”  This also kept it general enough that I could build details around them during play, so that no two “Stop the Mad Wizard” quests necessarily felt similar, let along the same.

After all that I found that there were a few systems I wanted to have that I didn’t have any good notion for.  How to move around the map was pretty easy: I remembered reading a post on Pencils and Papers about movement points and went off what I remembered from there.  My group had a Dwarf so their speed was 24 miles in a day, so they got 24 “movement points” to spend.  I kind of wish I’d thought to look over that post again before playing, though — I gave plains a move-cost of 5 and pretty much everything else a move-cost of 10 and i like the better granularity that P&P offered (which I guess he inherited from Brendan – who was riffing off Delta? I kind of love all the cross-pollination I’m finding). Anyways, I decided that you paid the Movement cost when you tried to leave a Hex.  I rolled for an Encounter whenever the group entered a Hex, and they could pay half the exit-cost to “search” the Hex and get another encounter roll.

Two systems I didn’t have that I wanted were a method for getting lost (and a similar method for finding your way again) and a system for foraging.  The latter, foraging, got preempted at the table by going with Pathfinder’s rules on the subject from the Survival skill (though I did vary DC based on terrain).  The Alexandrian hinted at what sounds like a really great hexcrawl system that included a mechanism for getting lost, but as far as I can tell he’s never posted the details.  The P&P/Brendan/Delta posts have a notion of getting lost based on Survival checks, and I spontaneously settled on a very similar system, with Survival for getting lost and Geography for finding your way again.  Still, I feel like I want something more-defined than that.

The game went off really great.  We had an Elven Ranger, Half-Elf Cleric of Gorram, Halfling Cleric of Pharasma, Human Fighter and Dwarven Druid.  They heard rumors of a dragon in the woods and met the sole survivor of a group who were apparently attacked by giant ants.  They got lost in the forest a few times, found a magic spring that got them drunk (the elf is the only one paranoid enough to not drink) and finally happened upon a dragon hunter who they joined up with to slay a Green Dragon wyrmling.  The cool thing is, I never planned on that happening when I seeded the rumors about the woods, I just wanted to warn them that dragons were on the table for Forest encounters.

My favorite scene of the night came about thanks to some odd behavior by a player and my inclination to say “yes.”  Early on the group met a travelling merchant, and the fighter spent a bunch of time going through his wares while the others asked him for rumors about the wilderness. He finally decided that he wanted to buy a shovel, and then proceeded to make Perception checks at every opportunity, looking for “anywhere that looks like there might be buried treasure.” I let him make the rolls and fail to find anything interesting, until he rolled a 1 on his check.  I decided that he found something recently buried that turned out to be a goblin grave under an oak tree.  Another of the players asked if goblin typically buried their dead in caskets, and the Ranger (who’s favored enemy is Goblins) rolled Knowledge and recalled that some tribes of goblins bury certain of their dead under oak trees as a sign of deep respect.  None of this was planned (I didn’t think they’d question a goblin in a casket), and now we’ve determined that they desecrated the grave of a goblin king. (I found out later that all my players thought he was digging up another traveler’s latrine pit…)

Weights and Measures

So I finally got the Strength Tables up on my Carrying the World on Your Back post; there has to be a better way to do tables in WordPress…

Anyways, I got the tables up and I wanted to share a few more thoughts on the topic.  The primary complaint about the D&D/Pathfinder encumbrance rules is that they’re too granular.  Each individual item is tracked with weights down to the fraction of a pound, and characters have varying levels of encumbrance based on their strength.  It’s straightforward but not easy or quick to calculate a character’s current encumbrance and, most damning, it is not easy or quick to figure out what the character needs to drop if he suddenly has to run from a monster.  I have a MS spreadsheet-based character sheet I grabbed off the Internet that does a good job tracking such things, but a system that requires a computer to use effectively is not a good system for a tabletop game.  Knowing what their biggest weights are should be as intuitive to my players as it is for their characters. This is the argument Pencils and Papers made that changed my mind on Encumbrance.

There are, I think, two ways to simplify the system, and both of them consist of moving to a coarser measure.  Delta suggested the use of the Stone, an archaic measure of weight that was roughly 14 or so pounds.  She kept herself to whole-Stone numbers, The Alexandrian introduced fractional-Stone measures with certain containers and the notion of Bundles (which he put as 5 Bundles to the Stone).  The math in the Alexandrian’s system bothered me, with talk about Stone and half-Stone and one-fifth-Stone (thanks to Bundles)…  So my thought was to set a Stone at 15lbs and a Bundle at 5lbs (1/3 Stone) and only track to the Bundle level.  I want to say that if it’s less than a Bundle you should ignore it, but I think that may make problems later on.

One of the things I’m happily cribbing from the Alexandrian is his general notions on how much things weigh and how things should be carried.  Basic weights for weapons and armor were taken by him from Delta, but he added containers and more granularity for miscellaneous equipment.  It should be noted that adding granularity when our intent was to reduce granularity is something to be wary of, but at the same time we don’t want to disassociate ourselves to much from the fictional world, and it’s not desirable to me to allow a player to carry infinite arrows or other such things.

From Delta and the Alexandrian, Heavy armor is 5 Stone, Medium armor is 3 Stone, and light armor is 1 Stone. Shields and full-sized (one- and two-handed) weapons are a Stone each.  Obviously characters should still recognize that a war hammer is weightier than a rapier, but I don’t think so much so that our mechanics need to care.  In particular, Items should be measured in whole Stone, as a single Bundle, or as a Bundle when collected (like arrows).

Light weapons in my system are a Bundle for 5, bolts and arrows are a Bundle for 20, and coins are a Bundle for 250. Miscellaneous gear should cover everything else from rations to potions to maps and whatever else you have.  Light items like a compass or Holy Symbol (unless it’s a particularly big or weighty holy symbol, I guess) can be ignored, and everything else gets put together in Bundles of 10.  In most cases if it’s less than a Bundle it can safely be ignored, but you may want to make exceptions if a character has several mostly-full bundles (3 daggers, 14 arrows, 200 coins and 8 misc. items should probably weight something).  Treasure should be assigned a weight by the DM, with a Stone being a hefty statue, a Bundle being a large gem or sack full of coins, and smaller items treated as misc. equipment.  Something unwieldy like a painting or rug may count as several Stone despite not actually weighing that much.

Containers include things like backpacks, belt-pouches, and sacks, and should be used to explain where a character puts his gear when he’s not holding it.  Weapons are assumed to come with sheathes and quivers which can attach to a belt or be slung over a shoulder, but other things need to be packed away. Empty containers are considered misc. equipment, containers holding things are ignored (just count the stuff they’re holding).

Finally, creature weights.  This will usually refer to familiars, who tend to be misc. equipment- or Bundle-sized. Small creatures are about 2 Stone, the average Human is 12 Stone, and a Large creature is 100 Stone. Individuals can weight more or less if you care to make a distinction, but should stick to whole-Stone numbers.  I’m just taking this stuff from The Alexandrian, so look to his page if you want to deal with larger creatures, though I’m not sure I want to know when or how the weight of a Colossal creature needs to be tracked…

Finally, for a guideline on figuring out weights of odd things you want in your dungeon, just divide the weight-in-pounds by 15 and drop any remainder; that’s how many Stone it weighs. If it’s smaller than a Stone but bigger than misc. equipment, call it a Bundle.

D&D? NEXT!

So a little background, I didn’t really encounter D&D until college, and by “college” I mean 2003, so it was right there with D&D 3.0 and 3.5.  I had a few terrible experiences with a few terrible DMs and decided I’d stick to my RIFTS and World of Darkness, thank you very much.  A few years later I heard about D&D 4E, saw the similarities with the MMOs I’d been playing for years, and felt it was an elegant solution to all the problems I saw with earlier D&D.  I’ve backed away from that opinion, but that’s maybe a discussion for another time.

By the time 5th Edition (are they really calling it D&D N5xt?) was announced, I’d already moved on to Pathfinder and figured there wasn’t anything they could do to bring me back.  Then I started reading about things like Hexcrawls and disassociative mechanics and complete game structures…  Suffice to say I dismissed 5E out of hand as something I could even care to follow.

This afternoon, I saw a post by a friend of a friend talking about the playtest materials (which I guess got released today?) and how it was a mix of 2E and 3E, consisted of a whole bunch of book-keeping, undid a bunch of what 4E had established, was catering to players that WotC had lost with 4E…  And now I’m thinking maybe I should rethink my initial dismissal of 5E.  Maybe there’s something there.

So, anyone out there been involved with D&D N5xt?  Does anyone have the playtest materials and can give me a second opinion?  Is there a way I can get the playtest materials?

Building Character

I just read an interesting post over at Pencils and Papers about Character Generation versus Character Building.  P&P seems to take, or have taken in the past, a lot of time comparing modern games to the ideals of OSR gamers.  OSR is the Old School Renaissance that’s budded up in the community recently with a, some say overly-nostalgic, preference for the games and systems of the 1970s.  I would have to say that I am at least on the fringe of that group (notionally, at least), but my interest is mostly in taking mechanics from the past that have been discarded and re-integrating them into modern games.  I don’t want to play D&D 2E, I want to play Pathfinder with hexmaps and random encounter tables.

But I digress.  The post I referenced talks about old school “character generation” where you roll a few dice, pick a class, and you’re done.  P&P says there’s a de-emphasis or discouragement for players to get too deep into the rules, ostensibly so they don’t limit what they believe are valid options in play.  This is contrasted with Character Building, where the player is presented a cascade of rules and options to play with and customize their character.  P&P talks about how he loves Character Building, how he fiddles with his character and plans out his next level ahead of time and writes up character sheets for the NPCs in his background.  This is exactly what I do, and I have the same level of glee.  But P&P concludes that Character Building is harmful to the hobby.  It can be daunting to new players and it can really bog down the excitement of starting a new campaign (never mind just getting a group together at random for an afternoon of gaming).  When I had my players build characters for my Expectations game I feel that I set out fairly rigid guidelines in order to help limit the overwhelming options they had to deal with — they had a Standard array of stats instead of rolling or point-buy and I had soft and hard requirements their characters had to satisfy (generally, be an exemplar of your Race and Class in some meaningful way).  it still took them roughly a month to finally get me characters, and even then their sheets were incomplete in places.  Granted, I don’t expect they were actually working on their characters for any significant portion of time, but that it took that long is ridiculous no matter how you excuse it.

There is a problem with Character Building, and like P&P no one I know (with maybe a few exceptions) enjoys the character creation process.  That being said, I for one dislike the notion of character generation, even if it has the benefit of drastically cutting down the time necessary to create characters.

P&P talks about an imaginary system that makes equally balanced characters either through Generation or Building, to allow people like he and I to gleefully twiddle our characters while at the same time letting less-enthusiastic players generate a character 10 minutes before play.  It’s not clear that such a system is possible, and P&P claims to be working on a stop-gap to use with Pathfinder.  I haven’t checked to see if he’s gotten anywhere with that, but I like the idea of it.

I’ll take a note here and say that this is one of the things that I really like about some of the non-d20 games I’ve played.  CAPES has a really quick, easy, and fun method of character generation, and it DOES work (in a sense) whether you generate a character with their templates or free-form (I’ve done both).  Burning Empires uses a lifepath-style form of character creation, and while it doesn’t necessarily make it quicker or easier to generate a character, background details naturally flow out of it (something which isn’t true of most other systems).

For my purposes, I think I’ll start putting together “generation guidelines” for my players to help streamline choices.  I think I’ll use his “X+INT skills at Level+3+attribute” idea (though, what happens if X+INT is bigger than the list of class skills?) and work on paring down Feat option.  From my post on Massaging Feats I already plan on doing some pruning there.  After that, you have issues like Stats, Class Features, Spell Lists, and Equipment that needs to be accounted for.  I may take a page out of another RPG I played once (can’t remember which) and just bundle up packages, like “Necromancer Spell List” or “Tomb Raider Equipment.”

If anyone has thoughts on this or ideas on ways to help make Character Generation possible in modern D&D, let me know.

On Die Rolls

My last post was about time, and how keeping track of things allows you, the DM, to coordinate events in the game-world without falling to fiat or “dramatic timing.”  I noted that it opened up a lot of possibilities, the most obvious of which is a reliable way to determine if the players make it to the demonic altar in time to stop the evil ritual.  In the comments, dhlevine proposed a third way of using contested game stats and a die roll to see if players make it in time.  I acknowledged the idea as an alternative, depending on the mechanics available to you and the desired effect, but after thinking about it I think I’ve concluded that reducing time to a die roll is as bad as DM fiat.  It’s arguably less biased, but if you’re going to roll a die to determine the time things take you might as well not keep track of time at all.

The key piece that’s informing my determination here is player agency.  It’s a term that I’ve only recently come upon, thanks to either Hack & Slash or Papers and Pencils (I can’t remember which I saw first). The basic idea is that players have ‘agency’ when they are given meaningful choices and the choices they make have consequences (good or bad) in the game world. It’s the notion that players can control their own destiny. When a DM or game mechanic takes away options, negates choices, or ignores consequences it results in a less engaging, less fulfilling game experience for the players.  This is why railroading doesn’t work.  Players denied agency become frustrated.

Bringing us back to the question of time, if the answer to “did we make it in time” reduces down to a die roll, then you’ve essentially negated any choices the players have made that would affect timing.  I suppose you could hand-wave it, or have penalties or bonuses based ion player choices, or do a preemptive roll to see if the character can/do take time to prepare…  But it all ends up with the dice, rather than the players, making the final determination.  That just strikes me as poor form.

I’d like to take a moment here and note that I don’t hate die rolls.  They are a useful method of conflict resolution, especially if well formed mechanics are built around them and used appropriately.  My point here is that using dice to determine timing is an unnecessary and inappropriate use, and you might as well simply declare timing by fiat as leave it up to the dice.

Take Your Time

Papers and Pencils had a couple of articles that struck me as really interesting, a discussion of the importance of tracking in-game time in RPG sessions, and a follow-up on the same.  What really struck me was the quote from Gary Gygax that P&P lead their first post with: “YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT.”  And those are Gygax’s ragecaps.

I started thinking about timing a while ago; one of the first Alexandian posts I read was on prepping situations instead of plots, and letting the situation (and the world) react to the player’s actions.  That calls for some amount of time management, because you need to know what events are starting and ending as the players move about the world, so you know what they prevent, what they interrupt, and what they miss.  That could be vague accounting, but the more vague it is the more similar it is to GM fiat — the players interrupt the ritual because the DM declares that they interrupt the ritual.  And like P&P points out, doing rigorous time management lets neat things happen, like having torches sputter out because the characters took too long.  Without requiring DM fiat (and avoiding that is a virtue, if you ask me).

P&P talks about three modes of timing that need to be addressed, which basically correspond to the three modes of movement: tactical movement, local movement, and overland movement. Tactical movement is used for combat encounters, and combat already has a rigorous method of time management that everyone is familiar with: the 6-second round.  P&P then suggests a 10-minute turn for local time management, and days for overland time management.  Turns can be sub-divided into minutes if necessary, and hours could be appropriate for either local or overland time management, depending on what’s going on.

Here are my suggestions for how to divide up and manage time; month, year, and season divisions are only appropriate for non-earth (or at least, non-Gregorian) settings:

6 second is 1 combat round.
10 combat rounds is 1 minute.
10 minutes is 1 game turn.
6 game turns is 1 hour.
24 hours is 1 day.
7 days is 1 week.
4 weeks is 1 month.
13 months is 1 year.
Each season (Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter) is 13 weeks (3 1/4 months) long.

P&P recommends tracking Local time my ticking off turns on a sheet of paper while the players move through a town or dungeon.  Shifting between modes can generally be ignored, unless the players take a really long time in a lower mode.  Five or 10 rounds of combat (30 seconds to a minute) when moving through town won’t make a significant impact on how many Turns to track.

In addition to being able to track things like secret meetings and evil rituals, time management can give you a reliable way to measure the passage of the seasons and long term events like wars and famines.  Calendars can be printed out and used to track events that happen during a session and to schedule events that could happen in the future (if the PCs don’t prevent them).  The possibilities are kind of exciting.

Campaign: Expectations

As I mentioned in my first post, a big part of what caused this blog to come into being was articles I read on The Alexandrian. What I read there prompted me to think about playing and DMing in ways that hadn’t occured to me before.  One of my first and favorite posts there is “D&D: Calibrating Your Expectations.” something that had bothered me for a long time was the way that D&D characters “weren’t cool” until you were in the higher levels of play, and by that point you’d out-leveled a lot of my favorite monsters (notably goblins; I love goblins).

There’s more I can say there and maybe I will in a later post. The point is that the post established Level 1 as “regular people” and Level 3 as “Figures of Historic Note,” with Level 5 settling somewhere around “Mythic and Legendary Characters.” This fit a lot better with my desires for D&D, and Justin had enough argument to convince me that’s what was intended.  Since then I’ve decided that my preferred form of D&D is E6 (where Level 6 is the cap and Epic rules come in to play).

I’m currently running a campaign appropriately titled “Expectations,” with my goal being to emphasize how cool low-level play really is.  There are actually two things I’m working against here: player notions of what their characters are capable of, and all-too-prevalent world-scaling found in most D&D games I’ve played in, heard of, and even run myself.  The two are, I think, strongly related and problematic, but I’ll set them aside for a separate post.

Expectations is the campaign that prompted me to really start looking at game structures and the lack of tools that I currently have at my disposal.  I’ll probably refer to it from time to time, and I intent to test a lot of the thoughts I share here in that game.

Massaging Feats

I’m going to go ahead and say that I’ve never really liked feats.People talk about how they’re good because they give players a way of setting their character apart from other characters with the same race and class, but I’ve never felt that sat right.

Papers and Pencils has an article up about the problem with feats, and it gives words to the issues I have with feats that I wasn’t able to express: namely, many feats ‘let’ characters do things that they should be able to do anyways.  Now, I’m not sure I buy his complaint about Willful Deformity — he’s right that anyone can take a knife to their face, but is that really enough to warrant a mechanical benefit for it?  And that’s kind of been my line for a while: sure you can do that in the fiction, but if you want a mechanical benefit you need the feat/trait/background/whatever.

I can’t find the article (or remember who’s blog it was on), but I read something recently that changed my mind on that a little bit. The article talked about how heroes in action movies — the guys we want our players to emulate — take crazy chances to get the job done; but players almost invariably take a more-cautious approach, choosing the tried-and-true tactics rather than trying anything fancy or risky.  And the point they made was that this happens because there’s no benefit for players to offset their risk.  If we want to encourage certain actions we need to have some mechanical benefit to offer players.

So when we have a feat that ‘lets’ a character do something they should be able to do anyways, it HAS to steal the mechanical benefits of that action in order to be meaningful.  Take Power Attack.  It ‘lets’ a character swing wildly, with the full force of their strength behind the blow.  They sacrifice accuracy for damage.  But why does this need to be a feat?  Can’t anyone sacrifice accuracy for damage?  That’s a bad feat.

Contrast it to a good feat, like Point-Blank Shot: you get a bonus to hit targets within a certain range.  It makes doing something anyone can do easier if you have the feat. P&P propose the existence of Feats that let a character do something that isn’t available to everyone, but I can’t think of anything like that off the top of my head.

I think there’s also a problem with a lot of the prerequisites, the way feats fall into tiers, but that has more to do with what level those feats effectively become available and what that means (which is another topic).

Properly understood, feats should be special talents and knacks that a character has that makes them more capable that untalented peers. Feats that don’t accurately represent that, or worse steal ability that should be generally available, should be removed.

Women Fighters

Just a quick plug here — the role of women in RPGs is a pretty… energetic topic of discussion.  I stumbled upon an interesting article on the subject from Game Knight Reviews, and though I’m still making my way through it I wanted to toss up a link to the Women Fighters Tumblr page they pointed to.  They post pics of women in “reasonable armor,” the sort of stuff that’s feminine but functional.  Just a useful source of inspiration for players and DMs.

Carrying The World On Your Back

A little bit ago, I read a post on The Alexandrian about how the current Pathfinder/D&D system for encumbrance doesn’t work and proposing an alternative method (influenced heavily by Delta’s D&D Hotspot and Lamentations of the Flame Princess).  Shortly afterwards, a budding DM friend of mine suggested something similar (probably borrowing from the same sources).  In both cases, though, I resisted; the Pathfinder system is accurate and granular, and the coarser measurements of the Stone system seemed to make things unnecessarily vague.  With the Pathfinder System I know when something is heavy enough to put me in the next load category, and it wasn’t clear that the same would be true with Stones, or that Stones would represent various character’s abilities faithfully.  So I cast Stones aside.

In the meantime, though, it’s become apparent that I was probably wrong, and that (as The Alexandrian noted), the current system might be accurate but it wasn’t useful.  Encumbrance was calculated once, at best, and then generally ignored.   computer could quickly and easily adjust a character’s load in real time, but it is kind of silly to have a system in a tabletop, ostensibly-paper-and-pencil role-playing game that requires a computer to use properly.  So I’m thinking of adopting the Stone encumbrance system myself.  The fact that saying things like “I’m carrying about 3 stone” is evocative for the setting helps.

Paper & Pencils had a post a short time ago about making encumbrance work.  There’s a lot of good stuff in there and it’s a big part of what finally changed my mind.  However, I didn’t like the Significant Item system they presented, or the fact that they tossed aside the notion of adjusting carry limits for Large or Small creatures.  The problem I have with that is that (1) a Small creature should be able to carry less than a proportionately-build Medium creature, and not all Small races have a STR penalty.  It seems weird to assume that all halflings are naturally stronger, proportionately, than their human counterparts.  The corollary to this is that shrinking someone would have no effect on their ability to carry their gear.  Granted, most extant “reduce person” spells have a STR penalty built in, but even if that weren’t the case, it’s only reasonable that a smaller frame wouldn’t be able to carry the same amount of stuff.  So I argue that encumbrance systems should take Size in to consideration.  I could be persuaded that this makes things unnecessarily complex, but I’m not sure it does.

I also liked The Alexandrian’s idea of bundles to replace Delta’s simple “misc equipment” category.   I think there should be better guidance on what can/should be bundled together — does 1 torch, 1 wand, and 1 potion really hinder someone as much as 5 torches, 5 wands, and 5 potions?  I did like his notion of containers and only being able to pack on so much gear, but I’m not sure I agree with his numbers for how much a character can life — particularly since they all seem to be less than the character’s “max load” numbers. it’s vague since Max load is listed in Stones and lift limit is listed in Pounds.

Most of the rules I would include can be found at the Alexandrian post.  This includes the general weights of items and creatures, how bundling misc. equipment works, and the use of containers.  The only change I would make is that light weapons are 5 to the bundle, ammunition is 20 to the bundle, and coinage is 250 to the bundle (750 to the stone).

Below are my own Encumbrance By Stone tables for Medium, Small, and Large creatures.  These are essentially a direct transform from the Pathfinder table, which by the numbers is apparently what everyone else did as well.  For my purposes, 1 Stone = 15lbs, more or less, which divides nicely into thirds. Bundles are 3 to the stone.

Gridlocked

So I’m kind of in love with hexcrawl mechanics right now.  This is the structure from the Alexandrian post that really grabbed me, and though I can’t quite put my finger on why I think it just solves a lot of issues I’d had with running games that have any amount of travel. They’re an elegant way to give the party information on their surroundings, meaningful choices to make on where they go and how they get there, and a structure for random encounters that’s more than just “roll the dice to see what you fight.”

In fact, I think that the departure from hexcrawls as a meaningful game structure is the root of a lot of common problems that the hobby has these days. DMs lack the tools they need to build the games we want.

So, what do you need for a hexcrawl?  The only real essential is a hexmap, but you’ll also want a way to key the map with encounters.  One option is to simply key each hex by hand but that leads to a lot of potentially-wasted effort, and what happens if the party revisits the same hex?  Random Encounter Tables or a system for Wandering Monsters is the better way to go, in my opinion.

I’m currently using Hexographer to build my maps.  They’re pretty intuitive and you can use it for free online.  I bought a copy, but that’s because it’s hard for me to no go full-bore on things I get excited about.  I’m using the Atlas Hex templates from Welsh Piper, and building my map based on their guidelines for the same.

The cool thing about the templates is they readily scale from a map the size of Alaska down to a regional or local level; just keep dividing the scale by 5 to zoom in to a new map (or multiply be 5 to zoom out). There’s a tool here I use to get an idea of how big the Atlas and Region templates are (radius for the Atlas template is 312.5mi, radius for a Regional Template is 62.5mi, radius for a Hex template is 12.5mi).  The Welsh Piper guidelines for painting hexes are useful and produce reasonable/realistic results, though I think their rules should bend or break occasionally to get the map you want.  I’m not sure every mountain range needs 5 miles of foothills, but you’d need to ask yourself what it means to have Mountains bordering right on your Plains; maybe a sheer rock face?

There are lots of options for how to key your map with encounters, and I actually haven’t settled on one yet.  I may try various systems by turns to see which I like the most. Welsh Piper has a key-by-hand system based on their Atlas Hex templates and a notion of Major and Minor encounters (either of which can be anything from a settlement to a monster lair or a natural feature). They also have advice on how to make these encounters meaningful without adding a lot of extra prep work, and the advice can be useful regardless of what encounter system you’re using.

Roles, Rules, and Rolls has a couple of posts on a Random Encounter system that goes well with a key-by-hand system; in fact, I kind of love it.  The first post talks about how the system works, and the second post gives an example of what it’s like in play.  Basically, once you’ve keyed the hexes of your map, this system lets you randomly choose how the party experiences those features and monsters as they travel through hexes.  It allows for stumbling upon the creature’s lair, but also has options for finding clues about monsters in neighboring hexes or encountering a creature that’s ranging out from it’s home.  My only lament is that I haven’t figured out a good way to incorporate it with random encounter/wandering monster tables.

Random tables are the alternative to keying each hex by hand.  Instead you mark off regions of your map (the Hohum Plains or the Fifo Hills or the Everglades) and construct a table of encounters based on what characters are likely to find in that area.  Goblins in the forests, farmers on the plains, crude altars in the hills.  Paper & Pencils has some good advice on ways to build out random encounter tables.  And there are other considerations that can be useful regardless of what encounter structure you’re using, such as what the monster’s doing when the party finds it, but I think I’ll set that aside for now.

On Starting The Blog

The genesis of this blog can be traced pretty neatly to a recent series of posts on game structures at The Alexandrian.  I’d been reading the blog for about a year or so and liked a lot of the ideas that Justin had, but this series was something of an epiphany for me.

The series was about Game Structures, the systems of mechanics inside RPGs that allow us to actually do things.  They’re what inform us on what to do next and how to determine success.  I came relatively late to the hobby, and if you’d asked me a month ago to answer those questions I would have said something like, “whatever makes a good story” and “roll a d20 against a DC,” respectively.  It had never occurred to me to think about game structures, and I had never examined the game structures I had available nor considered that there were other structures out there.  I read the Player’s Guide and DMG cover-to-cover and that’s all I needed to know, right?

In fact, no, that’s not all I need to run a good game, and now that I’m thinking in terms of game structures I can put context to a lot of the difficulties I’ve had with running games.  Why haven’t I been able to make exploration or travel compelling? Why does everything boil down to a Dungeon Crawl or Combat Encounter?  Because those are the only tools I have, and when all you have is a hammer you approach every problem as a nail.  So I’m starting this blog as a way to build up my DM’s Toolbox, to talk about game structures, collect the neat things I find on the web, and hopefully build a useful resource for others who come after me.