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Ratpick
Oct 9, 2012

And no one ate dinner that night.
I love the Battle Cry mechanic for Fighters and Dwarves. It gives them something to distinguish them from other classes at 1st-level beyond "can use all weapons and armor," and it meshes well with the original B/X rules. Nice.

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Small Strange Bird
Sep 22, 2006

Merci, chaton!

OtspIII posted:

Oh, that looks really cool! Would you mind giving us a quick summary of where to look for changes--it's a pretty big document. So far I've seen the whole central 'roll under' part and the bonuses/restrictions that classes get.
The underlying mechanics are pretty much B/X, just with roll-under replacing DM tables. Combat works the same way as B/X, though AC is now ascending, monsters have additional Attack and Save stats (derived from Hit Dice), and as much as possible has been converted to d20 (like morale checks). The spell lists have changed slightly - I got rid of some of the more wargame-y ones like Massmorph and added a few new ones like Swole's Mighty Blow and Slime Carpet, and Elves now have their own (smaller) selection instead of having the same ones as Wizards. Magic items work on a 'slot' basis similar to 3.x, and anyone can use a spell scroll if it's had Read Magic cast on it. Alignment uses AD&D's two-axis system, but it only really matters to Clerics.

Class-wise, Clerics don't have to memorise Divine Powers (replacing spells) before an adventure but can call on whatever they need from their god as they need it, Dwarves and Fighters get a Battle Cry (which forces morale checks on enemies they hit), Fighters get Cleaving Attacks and a Signature Weapon (proficiency, basically), Elves don't need spellbooks but can only know as many spells as their INT, and Thief skills have been massively simplified and tweaked (Hide In Shadows is now Hide In Plain Sight, for example). Apart from all that, it's essentially the same game.

Rulebook Heavily
Sep 18, 2010

by FactsAreUseless
Now I have something more substantive!

This is like a cleaned-up, more unified version of the way I love to run Basic the most: roll-under the number on your character sheet to succeed. It's very intuitive aside from the one obvious bit (I describe one being the best number as "you're number one!" but the pop chart is good) and the charts at the end to convert existing monsters are great.

Basically, I'd say that you're on a very good track, and I don't find any mechanical problems with it. You could easily clean it up with art and do a pay-if-you-want version. I'll see if I can do a playtest of it sometime.

Mirthless
Mar 27, 2011

by the sex ghost
:allears: I love this and I'm going to start a PBP game to playtest it right now.

thoughts and prayers
Apr 22, 2013

Love heals all wounds. We hope you continually carry love in your heart. Today and always, may loving memories bring you peace, comfort, and strength. We sympathize with the family of (Name). We shall never forget you in our prayers and thoughts. I am at a loss for words during this sorrowful time.

When my group finishes the next Trail of Cthulhu adventure I'll give this a shot. They have some unacknowledged murder hobo tendencies and this looks like an excellent enabler.

Nihnoz
Aug 24, 2009

ararararararararararara
the RC hit matrices list to-hit values for ACs up to like 19, but is it actually possible to get AC that high? An unarmored dude with 3 dex only goes up to like, 13. edit 12 sorry

Nihnoz fucked around with this message at 08:11 on Jun 1, 2013

Babylon Astronaut
Apr 19, 2012
How do you get your THAC0 above 20 to make it actually matter? 19 AC means the worst THAC0 would still hit on a 1.

Small Strange Bird
Sep 22, 2006

Merci, chaton!
BTW, I created seven test characters (one of each class) for my game in about 45 minutes today, so even though it's a different system it's still as fast as B/X. The most time-consuming part was buying equipment.

OtspIII
Sep 22, 2002

Payndz posted:

BTW, I created seven test characters (one of each class) for my game in about 45 minutes today, so even though it's a different system it's still as fast as B/X. The most time-consuming part was buying equipment.

I think chargen equipment-picking is a time you can throw some abstraction into B/X without hurting things at all. Just say new characters start with a weapon they can use, the best armor they can use, a set of Adventurer's Basics (torches, rope, rations, etc), and then something like 2 or 3 items from a list (shield, bow + arrows, 10' pole, hammer and spikes, thieves tools, etc). Maybe even give each class an item or two it can get for free on top of that (shield for fighter/cleric, bow and thieves tools for thieves, etc).

Rulebook Heavily
Sep 18, 2010

by FactsAreUseless
You could even make some pre-written suggested packages of items that cost X amounts of gold and let people pick from those.

Gianthogweed
Jun 3, 2004

"And then I see the disinfectant...where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that. Uhh, by injection inside..." - a Very Stable Genius.

Nihnoz posted:

the RC hit matrices list to-hit values for ACs up to like 19, but is it actually possible to get AC that high? An unarmored dude with 3 dex only goes up to like, 13. edit 12 sorry

Very rare but possible if a character/npc is cursed/feebled to the point of having a ridiculously high AC. AC 19 is pretty much a feeble old man who can barely move and is almost impossible to miss.

Small Strange Bird
Sep 22, 2006

Merci, chaton!

Rulebook Heavily posted:

You could even make some pre-written suggested packages of items that cost X amounts of gold and let people pick from those.
Good idea, I'll add some package options. (I thought I'd got this game out of my system now it was done, but I went back and tweaked a few things already, soooo... :sigh: )

Nihnoz
Aug 24, 2009

ararararararararararara

Gianthogweed posted:

Very rare but possible if a character/npc is cursed/feebled to the point of having a ridiculously high AC. AC 19 is pretty much a feeble old man who can barely move and is almost impossible to miss.

So I guess 19 is the AC of a bedridden old man wearing a -3 cursed shirt

Babylon Astronaut
Apr 19, 2012
I just realized that a level 1 character would need a 2 to hit AC19 at long range with a missile weapon. So I guess that matters.

homullus
Mar 27, 2009

Babylon Astronaut posted:

I just realized that a level 1 character would need a 2 to hit AC19 at long range with a missile weapon. So I guess that matters.

So it's really more like the AC of a bedridden old man wearing a -3 cursed shirt, and he is also the size of a barn.

Small Strange Bird
Sep 22, 2006

Merci, chaton!
Just made an addition to my system: at the end of a combat the PCs won (in the remainder of the turn; per B/X, battles and their clean-up last one turn), they recover a small amount of HP. The formula is 1/4 of their base Hit Die (ie, d4 for Wizards, d10 for Fighters, etc) rounded down, plus any CON bonus. This way, as long as someone's still alive after a fight, they won't be limping around on 1HP, and nobody has to spend any healing on very minor injuries.

I got the idea from the Next thread - ironically, from something that Next is not going to do. :v:

OtspIII
Sep 22, 2002

Payndz posted:

Just made an addition to my system: at the end of a combat the PCs won (in the remainder of the turn; per B/X, battles and their clean-up last one turn), they recover a small amount of HP. The formula is 1/4 of their base Hit Die (ie, d4 for Wizards, d10 for Fighters, etc) rounded down, plus any CON bonus. This way, as long as someone's still alive after a fight, they won't be limping around on 1HP, and nobody has to spend any healing on very minor injuries.

I got the idea from the Next thread - ironically, from something that Next is not going to do. :v:

Ooh, my party does this too, but we just have a 1-hp bandage option you can do if you took damage. Scaling it to hit-die size sounds like a good deal. Maybe it should cap at the HP you started the fight with, so people don't actively heal from easy fights?

Small Strange Bird
Sep 22, 2006

Merci, chaton!

OtspIII posted:

Ooh, my party does this too, but we just have a 1-hp bandage option you can do if you took damage. Scaling it to hit-die size sounds like a good deal. Maybe it should cap at the HP you started the fight with, so people don't actively heal from easy fights?
Good idea; I just added that too. I also made an addition to the Cleric's Heal power - you can either heal a decent amount of HP for a single person, or cast it on a vial of holy water to turn it into a healing potion. (Since Clerics are the class associated with healing, I wondered why it was Wizards who make one of the most common forms of healing. Issue now solved - and it's a nice little earner for religious orders!)

BTW, there was an error in the version of the rules I put online that made Heal less effective than Cure at higher levels, which has now been fixed.

JohnnyCanuck
May 28, 2004

Strong And/Or Free

OtspIII posted:

Ooh, my party does this too, but we just have a 1-hp bandage option you can do if you took damage. Scaling it to hit-die size sounds like a good deal. Maybe it should cap at the HP you started the fight with, so people don't actively heal from easy fights?

I wouldn't cap it, actually! If it's a really easy fight, and I didn't lose (more) HP during it, then my hit die gain could be treated as a morale boost.

"We kicked those monsters' asses! I feel GREAT!"

Elector_Nerdlingen
Sep 27, 2004



JohnnyCanuck posted:

I wouldn't cap it, actually! If it's a really easy fight, and I didn't lose (more) HP during it, then my hit die gain could be treated as a morale boost.

"We kicked those monsters' asses! I feel GREAT!"

Since it's also based on "the rest of the Turn", an easy fight lets you rest more and spend more time bandaging than a hard fight would.

I wouldn't cap it either.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
I WILL CUT OFF BOTH OF MY ARMS BEFORE I VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT IS MORE POPULAR THAN BERNIE!!!!!
I have too much on my plate at the moment, but if I did a sword-and-planet mashup of Labyrinth Lord (B/X Basic) and Mutant Future (Gamma World) would that have any appeal? Jack Vance died, and I've decided to read all his major works.

Bob Quixote
Jul 7, 2006

This post has been inspected and certified by the Dino-Sorcerer



Grimey Drawer

Halloween Jack posted:

I have too much on my plate at the moment, but if I did a sword-and-planet mashup of Labyrinth Lord (B/X Basic) and Mutant Future (Gamma World) would that have any appeal? Jack Vance died, and I've decided to read all his major works.

I'd say go for it, but I'm a big goddamn nerd who loves that particular genre and also really likes Mutant Future so I might be a biased audience.

Ratpick
Oct 9, 2012

And no one ate dinner that night.

Halloween Jack posted:

I have too much on my plate at the moment, but if I did a sword-and-planet mashup of Labyrinth Lord (B/X Basic) and Mutant Future (Gamma World) would that have any appeal? Jack Vance died, and I've decided to read all his major works.

At one point I toyed with the idea of a Mutant Future/Labyrinth Lord mash-up and I think it'd be great. One of the problems with Mutant Future is that because PCs have more hit points at 1st level, most monsters have in excess of one hit die. This wouldn't be a problem if it weren't for the fact that PCs use their level for to-hit rolls while monsters use their hit dice, which at low levels means that PCs won't be hitting poo poo while monsters will be hitting PCs most of the time. Running Mutants & Mazes and throwing in some genre-appropriate low-level LL monsters would fix this.

Nihnoz
Aug 24, 2009

ararararararararararara
How much does a Ressurection spell cost in the RC? I can't find anything about that in the book, but maybe I'm not looking hard enough.

Ryuujin
Sep 26, 2007
Dragon God

Halloween Jack posted:

I have too much on my plate at the moment, but if I did a sword-and-planet mashup of Labyrinth Lord (B/X Basic) and Mutant Future (Gamma World) would that have any appeal? Jack Vance died, and I've decided to read all his major works.

I have no idea what you mean by this but it sounds interesting.

Rulebook Heavily
Sep 18, 2010

by FactsAreUseless
Just gonna post this here, both for the thread and so I can find it easily later:

http://blogofholding.com/?series=mornard

What interests me most about this series of posts (and what I hadn't gathered before) is how the mapping thing seems to be a core aspect, to the point where a player who was so good that he never needed to refer to a map was the one who essentially tore the game a new one and finished Castle Greyhawk solo. I'd heard of Rob Kuntz' skill before but I'd never thought that it was attributable in such a large part to the mapping aspect of the game! There's also the aspect of not just making the map, but of having to rely on it: There is no "we get out of the dungeon" moment, you have to actually crawl in and then have enough resources to crawl back out.

And it's that final bit in particular that's a revelation to me. It makes the reason for the map click in my brain, and makes the really complex multi-level maps of later dungeons make sense to me. The game never transmitted that element of relying on the map to the audience, or at least not nearly this well. I've run the "we get out of the dungeon" bit as a series of wandering monster checks, but not as a desperate race where the mapping is put to the test.

Of course, the drawback of it is that there's one designated mapper. So much of the important bit of gameplay lies in one player's hands in that model.

OtspIII
Sep 22, 2002

Rulebook Heavily posted:

Just gonna post this here, both for the thread and so I can find it easily later:

http://blogofholding.com/?series=mornard

What interests me most about this series of posts (and what I hadn't gathered before) is how the mapping thing seems to be a core aspect, to the point where a player who was so good that he never needed to refer to a map was the one who essentially tore the game a new one and finished Castle Greyhawk solo. I'd heard of Rob Kuntz' skill before but I'd never thought that it was attributable in such a large part to the mapping aspect of the game! There's also the aspect of not just making the map, but of having to rely on it: There is no "we get out of the dungeon" moment, you have to actually crawl in and then have enough resources to crawl back out.

And it's that final bit in particular that's a revelation to me. It makes the reason for the map click in my brain, and makes the really complex multi-level maps of later dungeons make sense to me. The game never transmitted that element of relying on the map to the audience, or at least not nearly this well. I've run the "we get out of the dungeon" bit as a series of wandering monster checks, but not as a desperate race where the mapping is put to the test.

Of course, the drawback of it is that there's one designated mapper. So much of the important bit of gameplay lies in one player's hands in that model.

Mapping is weird. It's so so so important for a megadungeon-type game, but it's simply not interesting for most players. I don't think the "too much power in one person's hands" thing comes up too often, but the "role that nobody's really into filling" problem can be a huge issue.

That said, mapping is my favorite part of the game in my regular megadungeon game. Maybe a year and a half ago I took over mapping duty and assembled a great Master Map from all the other player's scraps and it has made an amazing difference in how the game plays. It's a ton of work and incredibly frustrating trying to figure out how to fix things when corridor A and corridor B end up connecting despite being 80 feet from each other on your map, but for some reason that type of frustration really appeals to me. Also, getting lost is easily the most deadly thing in a big dungeon game--far more dangerous than SoD poison (although nothing is as bad as level drain), so I'd actually say that not only having a map of your current delve, but also one of where you think everything is over the whole dungeon is incredibly important.

The most deadly session I think we've had so far was just when we fell in a chute that took us from Level 2 to Level 5. It wasn't even the trolls that were so scary, it was the fact that being able to leave when the party resources begin to drain is so amazingly important in Basic, and removing that option from people makes TPKs really likely. If I didn't already have a map of where I expected a nearby elevator to be we probably wouldn't have made it out of that trap alive. Every time I lose my map to a fireball or water elemental or something it's incredibly tense as I have to try to guide us out by memory, too--all in a way that I feel like is really fun.

For reference, here's Level 4 of our map. It's maybe 2/3 done, with levels 1-3 being more or less complete and level 5 just started (and 6/7 barely even scratched into).



And here's the rest of the map.

OtspIII fucked around with this message at 23:25 on Jun 10, 2013

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
I WILL CUT OFF BOTH OF MY ARMS BEFORE I VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT IS MORE POPULAR THAN BERNIE!!!!!
I've never cared about keeping track of overland travel, or even dungeon mapping. For overland travel, "it will take 4 days on horseback, consume 15 gp worth of supplies, and they'll have :rolldice: 2 random encounters" was more than enough detail to satisfy my 3.5e group. For dungeons, a few Rooms Important To The Plot connected by major hallways featuring a minor encounter and maybe a secret room or two was enough. However, I'm thinking I should actually map wilderness and dungeons for the next time I try Basic. Since a lot of what's in Basic is implied rather than explicitly communicated, much less instructed, are there some blogs or handbooks that give a good intro to mapping without it being a major headache? I just don't have the chops or the time to do maps with the level of detail that Otsp pulls off, and I don't intend to do overland maps to the point of assigning terrain types and random encounter tables.

Also, from the Next thread:

sebmojo posted:

It's easy enough to fake them, or you could use an ipod/tablet/laptop.

The spell lists in DCC are basically the best thing ever, each spell gets like a page and a half of random mutations associated with it, elaborate levels of success, awesome random effects.
I'm starting to hear good things about DCC on this forum, both regarding the Deed mechanic and the way spells work. I've skimmed the book, but I can't get past the :circlefap: intro where it says you're not allowed to play if you don't dream about Gary and Erol having a swordfight in your mouth. Is it really worth checking out?

Lacerda
Apr 20, 2004

Halloween Jack posted:

I'm starting to hear good things about DCC on this forum, both regarding the Deed mechanic and the way spells work. I've skimmed the book, but I can't get past the :circlefap: intro where it says you're not allowed to play if you don't dream about Gary and Erol having a swordfight in your mouth. Is it really worth checking out?

I'd say it's worth a shot: we played a session a few days ago and we adhered to the "character funnel" 0-level slaughter-a-thon that the game recommends at the start. 12 characters entered, 3 characters left. The first character to die had 1 HP and was instantly killed when the chain that lowered the platform into the dungeon dropped on her head.

I wound up with a horrible halfling vagrant who's currently wearing a fishman head like a hat.

Lacerda fucked around with this message at 16:17 on Jun 11, 2013

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
I WILL CUT OFF BOTH OF MY ARMS BEFORE I VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT IS MORE POPULAR THAN BERNIE!!!!!
Oh, I had a question about that specifically: What do you do when a party member dies in a pit trap and you need to quickly introduce new characters, via promoting hirelings to PC status or otherwise? The funnel made DCC seem to me like another retrogame that worships old D&D tropes without understanding why they existed.

Babylon Astronaut
Apr 19, 2012
Well that's what Rigby, Digby, Grigby, and Figby are there for. They can't all be Bigby.

Seriously though, do mean how do you generate the new characters or how do you introduce them? Generally in OD&D you just consulted the chart, and there weren't that many modifiers to work out. Roll 3d6 down the line, be dumb as a houseplant.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
I WILL CUT OFF BOTH OF MY ARMS BEFORE I VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT IS MORE POPULAR THAN BERNIE!!!!!
I mean high-lethality made sense when it was the standard in OD&D, because the assumption was that your character is a pawn, they don't have a detailed background that's integral to the campaign, you aren't attached to them, and they can be easily replaced by jumped-up hirelings--which take less than a minute to generate as 1st level PCs. I get that you don't have to stop your dungeon delve to run a new 0-level session every time you want to replace a character, but making it the standard to generate 0-level characters and then apply a class template sacrifices speed of generation so that DCC can take you by the hand and making sure you play Old School D&D the right way.

Rulebook Heavily
Sep 18, 2010

by FactsAreUseless

Halloween Jack posted:

Oh, I had a question about that specifically: What do you do when a party member dies in a pit trap and you need to quickly introduce new characters, via promoting hirelings to PC status or otherwise? The funnel made DCC seem to me like another retrogame that worships old D&D tropes without understanding why they existed.


The new character is introduced as a prisoner being held by the monsters in the next room. :v:

Another option is the "ascended hireling", if the game is at the point where the party has a bunch of NPCs in a caravan outside the dungeon or even along for the ride. Really, they played pretty fast and loose with it.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
I WILL CUT OFF BOTH OF MY ARMS BEFORE I VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT IS MORE POPULAR THAN BERNIE!!!!!

Rulebook Heavily posted:

The new character is introduced as a prisoner being held by the monsters in the next room. :v:

Another option is the "ascended hireling", if the game is at the point where the party has a bunch of NPCs in a caravan outside the dungeon or even along for the ride. Really, they played pretty fast and loose with it.
No no, I understand that completely. I'm saying DCC makes this more difficult for the dubious benefit of including a tutorial level in character creation.

VacuumJockey
Jun 6, 2011

by R. Guyovich

Halloween Jack posted:

I'm starting to hear good things about DCC on this forum, both regarding the Deed mechanic and the way spells work. I've skimmed the book, but I can't get past the :circlefap: intro where it says you're not allowed to play if you don't dream about Gary and Erol having a swordfight in your mouth. Is it really worth checking out?
I haven't had a chance to actually play it, but my impression is that it's intended to emulate a very specific kind of D&D, as elaborated on in that grog-ish intro - or perhaps it is really more of a manifesto. I've elaborated on this earlier in the thread, but Joe Goodman (the author) is completely upfront about what DCC is supposed to do, and judging from DCC's fanbase it performs as promised.

As you're here in the retroclone thread, you may well find DCC worth a look. :) IMO it certainly rubs a certain subset of grognards sweet spot. The printed DCC is full of great art and is overall an attractive book. That may or may not be important to you, but it is a drat impressive tome.

OtspIII
Sep 22, 2002

Halloween Jack posted:

Since a lot of what's in Basic is implied rather than explicitly communicated, much less instructed, are there some blogs or handbooks that give a good intro to mapping without it being a major headache? I just don't have the chops or the time to do maps with the level of detail that Otsp pulls off, and I don't intend to do overland maps to the point of assigning terrain types and random encounter tables.

Are you talking about mapping as a player or a DM? It's not too tough as a player--keep in mind the map I posted was literally the result of over two years of play. It can get a bit more intense as a DM, but the map-drawing isn't going to ever take as much time as the content-designing. I have been working on a set of metrics to make content population quicker for big projects, though--if people are interested I could totally write up a quick version of my process.

I've been tempted to make a map thread as a sort of zoomed in sibling to the worldbuilding thread as a place to talk about different map creation mindsets and a place to share whatever maps you make for your home games.

OtspIII
Sep 22, 2002

Ah hell, I'll just post my quick dungeon-creation guide whatever question you were asking.

A Quick Disclaimer

I should mention that I'm starting a MFA in Game Design in the fall, and I'm hoping to specialize in procedural level design, which makes dungeon-crawl D&D a perfect thing for me. I can't really think of another style of game where the gap between theory and actual play is quite as tight as in tabletop roleplaying. Anyway, it means that I do a lot of trying to take a semi-artistic creative process and reduce it down to a core set of cold hard rules while sacrificing as little of the fun as possible. I know that this is basically impossible, but I figure that it can be useful to establish this set of rules as a baseline and just encourage people to break the rules as often as possible. I see content creation rules as a thing that you should stick to if (and only if) you don't have any better plans. Being aware of the rules can make you aware of design concepts you'd have never thought of otherwise, and they can help get you through writer's block, but they should never constrain you--only inspire.

I guess I'll mention one big way I differ from the 'baseline' of B/X dungeon-building--every monster in my dungeon has a lair, and usually I have a few encounters worth of monsters in each lair. Whenever the party enters the lair I roll for each encounter to see if it's home or out hunting, and whenever I roll up a wandering monster I pick a random lair in the same zone and pull an encounter from it. It means I have more monsters in my dungeon than the B/X guidelines call for, but at the same time I don't have any infinite Wandering Monster hose feeding additional monsters into the dungeon. Each week there's a chance that each monster that died might be replaced by a newcomer, repopulating the dungeon with more monsters and treasure. I do it this way because the plan is for me to only run one dungeon, no matter which group of players I'm playing with, and I like the idea that one party might find the corpses or damage left behind by the other party. Other than this I actually stick pretty close to the population guidelines suggested by B/X and AD&D.

Quotas

Anyway, I cut up dungeons into 20-room 'zones'. I chose 20 rooms because I can just barely fit all the info I need to describe those 20 rooms onto a single two-page spread with the layout I use, but it's not hard to adjust up or down. Basic suggests that your dungeon should be 1/3 empty rooms, 1/3 monster rooms, 1/6 trapped rooms, and 1/6 'special' rooms, so I rolled with this and figured that for each 20-room zone I place should have 10 monster encounters (which should clump up enough to create ~6-7 lairs) and 7 rooms that are in some way interactive (be it trap or puzzle or hidden compartments full of treasure or NPC or whatever). It also suggests that 1/2 of monsters should have treasure, 1/3rd of traps, and 1/6th of empty rooms, so I try to make 7 treasure parcels per zone, 3 of which are in monster lairs, 2 of which are in interactive rooms, 1 of which is unguarded, and 1 of which is a wildcard. I also try to put 3 consumable item parcels (potions and scrolls and stuff) and 2 magic items in each zone. I also make sure there's at least one NPCish figure in each zone--someone who may take up either a Monster or a Special slot, but who will by default be a diplomatic challenge rather than a combat one. Ideally I should have more than just one guy with a personality per 20 rooms, but one is the bare minimum.

I usually figure out treasure values after I decide on the treasure types, but in a gp/xp system you've got to watch your distribution fairly closely. In general, you ask yourself what level you're expecting the party to be when they arrive in a zone, and how many rooms you think they get through in an average session, and how many sessions you want it to take them to level up, then do math at it until you figure out how much treasure an 'average' room should have in it. Then you double that amount, because about half the gold in the dungeon will either be too well-hidden for them to find or they'll 'lose' the XP from it by dying or something.

I won't get into the specifics of how I calculated this, but in general I want a 20 room zone of the following levels to have the following total amounts of treasure: 1:7272gp, 2:8889gp, 3:11,100gp, 4:19,040gp, 5:33,333gp, 6:59,259gp, 7:93,333gp, 8+:181,818gp. Again, these totals aren't something you should sweat too much, but they should give a rough idea of how much treasure you should put in a dungeon depending on what level the PCs are supposed to be when visiting it.

The Creative Process

I condensed all of this into, like I said, a two-page spread, making it easy to have all in front of me at once. One of the pages is just a list of all 20 rooms with a very brief description of their contents, while the other lists Special Rooms, Treasure, and Monsters. It ends up looking something like this.

So, when I want to actually start work on a zone the first thing I do is figure out a basic theme for it, then complicate it a little. I'm using this to make a megadungeon, so I actually have a murderously huge 82 of these zones as my target number, so thinking up good ideas can be a bit stressful, but in general this should be a relatively easy part of the dungeon-making process. 20 rooms is nice, since it's small enough that the rooms can all have a theme in common without that theme getting old, and it's big enough that you have room to fit a few things that don't really pay attention to the theme in on the side as well. If I'm having trouble coming up with a theme, or if I feel like it's not interesting enough yet, I'll roll on my giant d666 chart of inspirational concepts until I feel like I have something memorable. Then I'll do a quick scan of all the slots I have to fill in and write up any monsters/treasure/special rooms/decorations that immediately come to me.

At about this time I'll start mapping out what I want the dungeon to look like. I'll draw a quick outline on a piece of graph paper of where I want the major travel paths (generally 20' hallways) to be, then start budding rooms off of them. If a room I drew looks like it should be one of the rooms I've already described I'll assign it to be so, and if not I'll try to think up a new room that'd fit in its shape--mapping always gives me a lot of ideas for what types of rooms I need to add. I do this half-mapping half-designing process up until I've drawn out 20 rooms, then I go back and fill out all the remaining blank slots left on my zone description spread.

Once I've done all that I'll go over everything I've written so far and try to imagine how it all fits together. What's the relationship between the various monsters I've listed? What do each of them want? I'll roll up a random inspirational word for each monster and see if it gives me any ideas on how to make them more interesting than just a sack of damage and hit-dice in a room. If I come up with any ideas I wish I had thought of earlier I'll just cut out a room I've already designed and store it away for later use.

And, of course, the last step is always looking back over at what you just made and seeing if you've hosed it all up or not.

In my experience it takes about two hours to design a zone, and one zone will last you about 2-4 sessions of play for the players to more or less work their way through.

Ratpick
Oct 9, 2012

And no one ate dinner that night.
As far as DCC is concerned, one should also understand that it's not just a love letter to old school D&D but also to a completely different line of old school thinking: the fact that it has critical hit and miss charts as well as highly unpredictable magic demonstrates that it also traces some of its DNA to Rolemaster and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. While it's not exactly to my tastes it's a great example of how there can be more to design that emulates old school RPGs that doesn't just have to be "let's rehash old-school D&D again."

There are other games that do this, absolutely, but DCC demonstrates that you can easily borrow from other old school games to put a unique spin on ye olde D&D.

thefakenews
Oct 20, 2012

Halloween Jack posted:

Oh, I had a question about that specifically: What do you do when a party member dies in a pit trap and you need to quickly introduce new characters, via promoting hirelings to PC status or otherwise? The funnel made DCC seem to me like another retrogame that worships old D&D tropes without understanding why they existed.

The funnel is only used for the first session basically, and every player should have at least 4 characters. It is suggested the players have two or more PCs through the first few levels. Most of the level 0 adventures published contain a place to free prisoners or similar for a new character.

Once you are above level 0 then DCC characters are actually a little tougher than level 1 PCs in other versions of D&D because they keep their level 0 HP on top of the HP for their other levels.

There is also a rule that if a level 1 or above character dies and the other PCs survive then they can "recover the body" which gives the character a saving throw to actually be found a live but wounded (ability score penalty).

The funnel is intended to be absurdly deadly, the rest of the game past level 0 is not intended to be particularly more deadly than B/X as far as I can tell (bearing in mind I'm not an expert on B/X).

Edit: In terms of character creation speed, it is still quick. 0 level characters don't really have anything but attributes and HP, so giving them class levels isn't really any more complicated than building a level 1 PC. You can just straight up build a higher level PC. There are even generators for doing so that give you a PC in seconds.

thefakenews fucked around with this message at 00:17 on Jun 12, 2013

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Gasperkun
Oct 11, 2012
Anyone checked this out yet? Maybe you didn't know it existed since it just released today. I am interested in looking at it; have been since I first heard about it but I am now trying to keep my head above water because my gaming budget for the month is probably spoken for.

Seems to be old-school with some new-school meshing. If nothing else, I guess now you know about another old school game out there!

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