Things to come (+joesky tax)

My D&D campaign is now officially paused. This is a good thing, because I'll now have the time to take a very hard look at the D&D rules and see what flinches. I did this before on this here blog and at least it helped me to fine tune my house rules and to understand better, what D&D is about (maybe...).

No D&D for my group in the near future.

About the blogging experience.

I'm really not sure I want an audience, to be honest. Of course I want to share my ideas with the OSR and all that. But I just don't think the quality of my ideas match the quality of the things already written in our small community of the web. To me at least it seems clonky at times. And that's for two good reasons: I'm neither a skilled writer nor is my level of rules transcendence very high.

So the reason to blog at all is to GET THERE. Find a voice, get the knowledge, get used to write something on a regular basis. Don't fear the trolls (or pay the bridge toll...).

And for that I might need an audience after all.

But what to do, what to do?!

My regular group will, if Ze Gods are in a good mood, engage in Witchcraft for a while now and I'll be all over D&D variations only in theory. I'll try to post two or three posts a week. Focus should be on some of the following topics:

• Futher deduction of house rules from THE GAME. My goal shall be to be able to write down rules in a few sentences (as it should be). But to get there, I have to dissect it first.
• Every aspect of the game should be open for revision. I want to go deep into the rules and make them my own (classes, experience, etc.).
• What do I need in a game? What is necessary to achieve that?
• A working setting is is as much part of the rules as anything else (at least in D&D), so before I'm going to  DM another session of the D&D Bastard of my choosing, I'll try and develop a setting, monsters, random tables, etc..

Also I'll try to be a good boy and be more active in the community. Blogging is a lot of work. Nobody mentioned that.

Shameless self promotion (skip that, gentle reader, it's hard to stomach for myself, too):

I'm so glad Jeff Rients is back and not only for the obvious reasons (his blog is one of the best out there and you know it). No, it's also the only blog list I'm on. There, I said it, I want traffic, maybe even some comments. So if you're a blogger and willing to have my blog in your list, I'd be very happy about that (and return the favour, of course, for whatever that's worth).

----------------------------------------------------------

JOESKY TAX

A plague nobody wants to heal with magic, because (1D8+):

1. It's justified, the gods think it's a good idea and put the lid on healing it.
2. The gods are the reason for the plague, nothing to do about it.
3. They fear to get the plague themselves. Nobody needs a dying pantheon.
4. Finding the cure another way will save the world from something more dangerous (not that anybody is telling...).
5. This is no plague, it's the transformation to something new (they say).
6. The gods are not affected, but the channels to the gods are. It taints magic.
7. To heal it makes the cleric loose faith permanently. Nobody knows why (or do they?).
8. To die from the plague transforms a victims soul to ambrosia in the netherworld. A freak accident, but the gods like ambrosia very much.
9. ...

How to kill a horse (Again about Endurance...)

This is not about animal cruelty. It's rather a dry-run for the Endurance system I proposed here and here (and thanks to the comments by 1D30!).

I really hope somebody will take the time to read all this (and maybe comment?). Sorry for the huge post, I guess (it's not what I meant with "Again about Endurance").

After doing a little research, I realized it's hard to find rules for extreme travel situations like forced marching or how far you can push a horse without killing it. This might be due to the fact that to many factors need to be considered or that it doesn't happen that often in a game and a rule of thumb is enough to make it happen.

But it should be possible to estimate the breaking point for an individual (be it character, npc or monster) derived from actuall play and I think it should have a place in the game (not just a number in a table...).

So what do we have?

Endurance (very short summary):

• Characters use CON/2
• Monsters/NSCs use 4 + HD
• A fight costs 1 Endurance (you loose more in a fight, but it's recovered fast, see links above)
• Skill checks cost 1 Endurance
• Endurance is only recovered with a full days rest (or magic)

Travel rates will be taken from the Rules Cyclopedia as a guideline for the loss of 1 Endurance per miles travelled:

As per Rules Cyclopedia. p. 88

Interesting part:

"The travel rates listed here are possible but will kill the horse if only one is used for the entire trip. Typically, a rider only manages to achieve these rates by riding one-third the distance listed and trading his horse in twice at way stations for fresh mounts. At the end of the day, he and the three horses are exhausted, but all are alive. If a rider does not intend to kill or exhaust his horse, he should use the travel rates listed for the war horse instead." (RC, p.88, Travelling Rates by Terrain Table)

This assumes a rate of 72 miles/day under ideal circumstances (36 miles/day with a war horse or travelling without killing a riding horse). Is this realistic? Google agrees mostly, so I'll take it as a basis and go from there.


Now some calculations and additions to make it fit.

• After 36 miles/day a riding horse is exhausted (normal road/weather for travel).
• Having an Endurance of 6 this means it looses 1 point Endurance every 6 miles travel.
• Doubling the speed doubles the loss of Endurance, so with a travelling rate of 72 miles/day it looses 12 Endurance (which is the maximum before the horse is in mortal danger).
• A first skill check is needed to keep the horse going after it reaches zero Endurance (36 miles)
• After 72 miles a second skill check is due, after that it needs a successfull skill check for every six miles (the rider looses 1 Endurance for every skill check).
• The rider additionally looses 1 Endurance for 12 miles travel.
• So if the rider in our example wants to get there (see below), he has to succeed in 5 skill checks or the horse struggles and goes down before he arrives.
• Any mount can be forced a number of times equal to it's HD and is entiteled to a save versus death to survive the treatment, after that it just drops and dies with the first failed skill check (same goes for humans, etc.).

Obstacles

With 36 miles/day being the suggested norm, I'd go for 3 possible random encounters on the road (ca. 3 times the norm). Each encounter could force a skill check to avoid and costs Endurance.



This leaves us with the following basics to apply the idea everywhere.

Having four legs is a boon, so a horse would only loose halv the Endurance a human would, while sitting on a horse makes a human only loose half of what the horse is about to loose. Other than that I took the base rate (36 miles for being exhausted) for a given factor (riding horse, 2 HD) and divided it by the Endurance (4 + 2 HD = 6). So here are a few examples how it turns out (based on the table above):

Travel Mode      Trail    Clear   Hills   Mountains Desert
Foot              1/3      1/2     1/1       1/1      1/1
Horse, riding     1/6      1/4     1/3       1/2      1/1
Horse, war        1/5      1/3     1/2       1/2      1/1

With this on hand it is possible to see how far an army might get with forced marching and how many dead would be left behind.

Or one could try and see if a courier would be able to deliver a urgent message in a totally random setting and with a satisfying result...

So this is a small setting and a dry-run.

-------------------------------------------

Let's build a course for our courier. I used the always fantastic Abulafia to generate the background information and gimp for the map. This is what I got:

Cave Bridge is a dangerous farmland in the frozen north.
The weather there is usually almost windy and warm out (because of the Letchhead Gulf).
It is ruled by an ancient vampire (Count Shrop).
The people of this domain are cannibals (a cult that worships the Count and eats the sucked-out victims of him and his vampires).
This domain is famous because it is a place of uncanny magical occurances (see the red skulls).
The laws of this domain are harsh and unjust. Punishments for misdeeds tend to be almost nonexistent.
Recently, the land has experienced the flight of a prince and his forbidden lover into hiding .

Cave Bridge (I'd go for 10 miles per hex)

Hexmap Key

Castle, Towns and Settlements:

0500 Shropcastle
0800 Scholar's Peak
0401 Muntonburgh
0201 Inverby
0704 Chesterwich Farm
0802 Rustyhickory
0305 Trebluff
0505 Havster Springs
0006 Lydstanham
0808 Confidantsbarton Springs
0905 Axefathom
0208 Tower of the Relentless
0508 Monk's Vale

Landmarks:

0205 Ivory Arch
0208 Barber's Cove
0303 Dolphin Kurgan
0304 Ruins of Bird Haven
0306 Northwood Bluff
0401 Queen's Bridge
0403 Tree of the Banshees
0507 Bear Head Trail
0507 Bear Menhir
0508 Monk's Vale
0601 Dishonor Cave
0701 Neophyte Mines
0701 Brazen Hill

Areas (land):

0505, 0506, 0605 - 0607, 0704 - 0708, 0807 - 0809 Tinker's Flatland
0502, 0602, 0603, 0702, 0703, 0802 Hog Forest
0305, 0405, 0406, 0504 Griffon Morass
0403, 0404, 0405, 0503 The Marsh of Destruction
0306, 0307, 0408 Berkway Forest
0201, 0202, 0301 Dawn Delta
0006, 0106 Owlbear Isle
0204, 0205 Westlock Archipelago

Areas (sea):

0000 - 0009, 0100 - 0109 Letchhead Gulf
0200 - 0207 Titan Coast
0208, 0209 Wolf Coast
0105, 0206, 0207 Bullsmore Channel
0003, 0004 Hunter's Sargasso

-------------------------------------------

The Course:

Our courier starts at the Wolf Coast from the Tower of the Relentless and aims to reach Muntonburgh as fast as possible. He wants to arrive within the day.

Using the roads available, he has to pass two towns (Trebluff, Havster Springs) and use Queen's Bridge to get there. It's round about 100 miles.

This means he has to travel through Berkway Forest, the Griffon Morass and, finally, the Marsh of Destruction.

And now we deliver an importand message

We need a normal horse and a skilled Courier to make this happen. If it is a player character, one starts with the distance he wants to cover and goes from there (maybe even with an individual horse, healing potions, etc.). In this example I'll keep it as simple as possible (with no random encounters):

The Horse: 2 HD, 6 Endurance

The Courier: 3 HD, 7 Endurance, DEX 12 (riding +5)

First skill check (Courier Endurance after 36 miles = 4):

Dex 12 + 5 (riding) + 1D20 (15) vs. DC 25 (success)

Second skill check (Courier Endurance after 72 miles and one skill check = 0):

Dex 12 + 5 (riding) + 1D20 (18) vs. DC 25 (success)

Third skill check (Courier Endurance after 78 miles and two skill checks = -1):

Dex 12 + 5 (riding) - 1 (Endurance) + 1D20 (19) vs. DC 25 (success)

Fourth skill check (Courier Endurance after 84 miles and three skill checks = -3):

Dex 12 + 5 (riding) - 3 (Endurance) + 1D20 (18) vs. DC 25 (success)

Fifth skill check (Courier Endurance after 90 miles and four skill checks = -4):

Dex 12 + 5 (riding) - 4 (Endurance) + 1D20 (12, close call...) vs. DC 25 (success)

Sixth skill check (Courier Endurance after 96 miles and five skill checks = -6):

Dex 12 + 5 (riding) - 6 (Endurance) + 1D20 (14) vs. DC 25 (success)

So they manage to arrive in Muntburgh, the courier is dead tired, the horse stops and drops dead. I'm happy with that, it is as it should be. But don't try this at home...

The Thief (Reskinning Classes: Part 2)

It's about time...

...someone inspires me to finish my thoughts on the Thief (and reskin it like the MU some time ago...). With all this writing about it, -C finally hits a sweet spot for me in (basically) handling the Thief abilities like Weapon Mastery in the Rules Cyclopedia. Wuhu! It's genius! Let's reskin the Thief.

(funny pic to emphasize how I feel about this)

Basic assumptions for The Game.

In game terms I found it always somewhat unrealistic that Thieves have no access to magic other than using magic items and scrolls at some point, but have no problems handling magic traps. There are just no other connectors. So using this in our game Thieves are able to cast spells with a quarter of the abilities a MU has and more oriented on physical spells like spider climb or jumping (other spells need more Mana). Works out fine so far.

With a skill system in charge, using Thief Skills as they are presented in D&D is not very ideal. On the other hand using the system presented as Weapon Mastery in the Rules Cyclopedia to enhance existing skills for the Thief is just what I was looking for to make this work.

Skill Mastery:

• The abilities/skills a Thief has access to are: Backstab (melee), Backstab (ranged), Acrobatics, Sleight of Hand, Stealth (moving, hiding, keeping a low profile or doing something like picking a lock in total silence...) and Sabotage.
• Using the skill system of the Rules Cyclopedia, every class has access to other skills. So skills like Disguise or Alchemy are, too, relevant for Skill Mastery.
• At character creation a player may now choose (like with Weapon Mastery) 4 of those abilities/skills for Skill Mastery.
• Basic Skill Mastery is one additional D6 either for the skill check or for backstab damage.
• Every 3 levels a Thief gets one more point Skill Mastery to distribute.
• Progression is: Basic +1D6, Skilled +1D8, Expert +1D10, Master +1D12 and Grand Master +1D20.
• Echo applies.

Thief reskinned*:

1. Take the Thief as written.
2. Divide ability to Backstab.
3. Divide Thief Skills.
4. Add Skill Mastery (this includes Backstab again).
5. Add 4 skills (Acrobatics, Sabotage, Sleight of Hand and Stealth in my case).
6. Add ability to cast spells (like 1/4 MU, first spells at Level 4).

New xp value to reach level 2: 1600 xp

List for spell level 1 (proposal, 1D10 for random pleasure):

1. Affect Normal Fires 
2. Audible Glamour 
3. Change Self 
4. Charm Person 
5. Comprehend Languages* 
6. Dancing Lights 
7. Featherfall 
8. Jump 
9. Sleep 
10. Spider Climb

This is it. I think it is highly compatible with the Rules Cyclopedia and any hack close enough to that.

*Again using this pearl of wisdom.

Mean Monsters (Halloween Edition)

Faceless Spectre (aka The-Girl-You-Only-See-From-Behind)

This encounter could be considered a trap and a mystery. Nobody knows were these dark spirits come from or why they show themselves. Maybe their souls are trapped in a painting, maybe something forced them to see the abyss. Maybe they need help. All this is of secondary importance, because most of all it should scare the players shitless.

This poor little thing needs help...

What happens:

In this case I'd go for a little girl as Faceless Spectre. Stats are not needed* and you can place this encounter whenever you have an empty room conundrum (in a dungeon, an abbandoned house, you know the drill).

Let the girl appear behind the players, just out of melee weapons range and right after they think the room is empty and/or safe. She's uncomfortably close. Obviously alone in the ruins of your choice. She looks like a normal (that is: solid) 10 year old girl with black hair and a white dress. She is turning her back to them and not moving.

They don't even see a glimpse of her face and she won't do anything but appearing out of nowhere and standing there (it is important to emphasize this).

Talking to her will produce no reaction at all. If they ignore her, nothing will happen. If they attack her, she will disappear (but will come back...). If they try to look at her face? Well, that way is madness. It won't happen easily (she moves to avoid this), but if forced or tricked any player trying gets a glimpse at true evil/hell/the abyss. But don't describe anything, just the reaction. If a save versus death works, the characters hair turns white and he will never tell what he saw. If the save fails, you get to roll 1D12 (see below).

If they try to turn her, she will face the group.

Unprepared this could be a very cruel encounter, so ideally the group should find either some results of the table below, a picture of the girl (same clothes , a nice portrait, but a sinister touch to it) or hear some rumors about her.

If an explanation is needed, I'd go for an evil wizard that trapped her soul in a picture for some sinister reason or another (present for a demon; a sequence of 13 pictures like this to achieve immortality; the daughter of a king, doomed forever to see unimaginable evil; you name it...).

Helping this poor soul should be rewarded accordingly.

D12 for looking at her face (and failing the save) you will:

1. ...scratch your eyes out.
2. ...attack your group as brutal as possible.
3. ...go to the next wall and face it till you starved to death.
4. ...be possesed by a demon! go from there...
5. ...die screaming, eyes wide open and with bloody tears.
6. ...kill the next random innocent stranger in public, you won't remember the incident, anybody around you will.
7. ...go to the next stony surface and scratch again and again "I'm sorry" on it, use your fingers, out of fingers, use the stumps, you can't stop.
8. ...commit suicide as soon as convenient.
9. ...run away, when nobody sees you, you'll turn into a Faceless Spectre.
10. ...wake up on a graveyard the next morning (and this will happen often...), all dirty, embracing a freshly unearthed corpse.
11. ...never sleep again, literally, never.
12. ...see and understand, your INT drops to 2, WIS is raised to 18, permanently.

All but number 12 forgot what they saw and number 12 won't be able to tell...

Happy Halloween!

*Treat it like any ghost version you see fit.

Die Hard 0e (or: Exhausted Characters and Skills)

I know, second post in October, something is wrong with me... Anyway, now more about Endurance.

Something about skills doesn't bode well!

I like the basic ideas of skills (here is my take on it) in a game. After all they give some depth to the world and the characters therein. BUT, and this is a known problem, they tend to either bloat the game or they produce unrealistic/unsatisfying results after the roll, basicly because one roll not only encapsulates complex processes but could also end them abrupt.

Wait! There is an easy fix for that!

True enough, handled with care skills might just work fine. Mostly, if you think about it, it's about the subtleties. You don't succed in your climb check? You just don't fall of the cliff, but you get a save to catch yourself midways and a little damage. Stuff like that, you make it part of the tension you try to establish in the game. And then you have stuff like automatic successes, alternating difficulty settings and nice houserules like the one Zak S. introduced in January.

So what's wrong with that?

Well, even if a failed skill check allows another skill check (or a partly success or whatever rule you apply), it basicly means the character should have succeeded in the first place. Plus: after the roll it's not the players decision what happens next, but the DMs. I think, the longer a player is able to influence what is happening to his character, the better. Especially with skills that a character is more likely to succeed if he is inclined to do so. This is where Endurance comes in handy.

Give the players the decision if they fail or not...

So this is how we do it: Using a skill costs one point Endurance (it being one point, it won't be regenerated before a full rest restores all Endurance). Whenever a players fails in a skill check (other than with a critical failure, that is), he is allowed to use Endurance to achieve  a success. If this puts his endurance to a negative, he gets to save with the negative value as a penalty and the RESULT is where the DM reacts (this gives me another idea*).
In a team effort he looses one point less Endurance per player involved (but at least one point). And again, 10 minutes after the skill challenge, all but one point Endurance are back (if a player used his option to fatigue himself, he effectively lost two points: one for the skill challenge and one to use Endurance to succeed). Should work with simple attribute checks and definitely works with the 3rd edition skill system.

But how to use this in The Game?

Endurance works for the body AND the mind. So even a research check (something that should bring a result other than "Sorry, you find nothing..." anyhow) might be exhausting for a character, because he pushes himself to get results. So after all this works with nearly any skill check a game could come up with. It goes without saying, that it also takes longer to get an result, if you exhaust yourself. And still, failure is an option, if a character is pushed into negative Endurance, but then, as stated above, exist enough rules to handle a situation like this.
Furthermore, if the players wind down after a fight/skill check, this is easy for a DM to keep track of and another easy tool for flavour texts. It's also an active and easy to handle ressource for the players and the benefits outweigh the detriments (would it be the other way around, they would rest even more than they already do...), while the disadvantages not only still have an impact on the game, but also give it a more gritty feel.

*Addendum: Desperate Blow - Use 1d10 Endurance as a to hit with your next attack

Die Hard 0e (or: Exhausted Characters in Combat)

Another part of my houserules for the gentle reader to consider.

And another Hackmaster 4e relic

Arguably the best tools for a DM help him describing the situation the characters are in and happen to work by just looking at what's already there. I like my games as gritty and dirty as your next favourite Die Hard movie and I like giving my players the feeling they can shine in the most desparate situations without throwing encounter after encounter at them. So, I thought, an element of exhaution, like the rules for Fatigue in Hackmaster, would do just fine in my game.

How to implement Exhaustion in an D&D game (a proposal)

Take half your Con as Endurance. In a fight you loose one point per round, with a critical hit you loose as much Endurance as you've lost hp. If you play with skills, you may allow players with a related skill to have their full Con as Endurance (alternatively you could give only fighters full Con or whatever tickles your fancy). Ten minutes of resting and breathing hard after a fight regenerates all but one point of your Endurance. This is cumulative until you have a full rest.

What happens if you hit zero endurance?

With zero Endurance a character counts as Exhausted. He is last in initiative and (playing with Rules Cyclpedia) his Weapon Mastery is down to Basic. MUs have to make an Int-check when casting or the spell (mana, whatever) is lost. Every round after that gives a cumulative -1 to AC, to-hit and check until it reaches the characters negative Endurance value. After that the character goes down, breathing hard and only able to crawl.

Monsters and Endurance

As easy as: 4 + Monsters HD as written (example (Goblin): 4 + 1 HD-1 = 4 Endurance)

Next up: Die Hard 0e (or: Exhausted Characters and Skills)

There is a lot more to say about Endurance in a game, but this is another post entirely...

Dungeon Encounters Threatlevel

Just to fix this idea somewhere

It's about this pearl of wisdom. The more noise players make, the higher is the probability to get caught in the dungeon. Obviously derived from another system without random encounter tables, but easy enough adapted to the D&D-System of your choice. I never was that much for random encounter tables (wandering Monsters is a different thingy alltogether), mostly because it's to abstract as a subsystem (not connected to a dungeons features or ecology). With this cute little subsystem a dungeons powerstructure has a direct impact on the players actions just by using what is already there. But judge for yourselves:

Direct consequences to the players actions and capabilities

Next time I want to know if the players get into trouble for being noisy, I'll do it like this:

10 (basic assumption) + Thiefs Level + Precautions the party has taken - Monster HD - Incidents/Features => 0 or less = Encounter (and reset to starting threatlevel minus number under zero)

For groups of monsters the highest hd-value counts, individual Monsters have their own threatlevel in an area. And yeah, that way the Lich or Dragon in the dungeon might already know that you're around if you're too weak or sloppy, but that can't be a surprise.

Precautions (ideas so far, not a complete list):

• Silenced Armour gives party +1
• Time spent observing an area (+1 for 2 hours observation, etc.)
• Using dungeon features as an advantage (disguises, safe rooms, etc., apply ad hoc)
• etc.

Incidents/Features (much easier, but still not complete):

• - 1 for every round of noisy fighting
• - 1 for kicking in a door
• - 5 for hacking down a door
• - 1 for loud noises, whatever the reason (screaming like a girl, arguing, singing, you name it)
• - 1 for triggering a trap
• - 1 for leaving bodies behind (dead hirelings/PCs, whatever)

... that's it so far. Accumulate the points and as soon as you reach zero, a Monster will take action against the intruders.

So now they know you're around...

And that's the most important thing a DM needs to know. That's when he can plan ahead or act (sometimes only by knowing how the group intends to approach the dungeon!) according to the Monsters level of intelligence and/or organisation (see reaction tables and whatever tool about the Monsters mo is available).
The other important thing is to let the players know this subsystem is at work. They might not know the Threatlevel, but they will know that there are severe consequences for being loud in a dungeon:

Don't know how regularly I'll be able to post in the future, but if I think it's something of value, I'll bring it online. Cheers folks!