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I'm a supporter of the interpretation that the Fighter is MC Killzalot with a golf bag of weapons that he's all always a master with after hitting a certain level.
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Dec 31, 2014 02:45
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Yeah, I don't have the book handy but if I remember correctly you could either fully specialize in three weapons completely, or be really good with a few. Generally speaking you got all the cool stuff with two or three levels of mastery; more levels would just let you do them more often. And yeah, the whole thing with Basic fighters is that they're supposed to be the guys with the golf bag full of weapons. The Mastery rules gave you a mechanical reason to do that.
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Dec 31, 2014 03:00
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The tables and such in Basic were pretty generous with items too, weren't they? Even if most of what you get is potions.
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Dec 31, 2014 03:42
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Evil Mastermind posted:Yeah, I don't have the book handy but if I remember correctly you could either fully specialize in three weapons completely, or be really good with a few. Generally speaking you got all the cool stuff with two or three levels of mastery; more levels would just let you do them more often.
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Dec 31, 2014 04:04
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Okay, now that I'm near my book: Fighters can get up to 15 total levels of Mastery old told. That's enough to fully master three different weapons, but for the most part going from 4 levels to 5 only gives you slightly better damage. Halloween Jack posted:The tables and such in Basic were pretty generous with items too, weren't they? Even if most of what you get is potions. Kind of? The best percent chance of monsters having magic doodads was 50%, and that was just to have 1d4 scrolls. But if the GM does roll that there's treasure, you're going to get like five items.
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Dec 31, 2014 04:21
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Going back to the topic of low-level Magic-Users and their lack of spells, a neat little mechanic I picked up from Crypts and Things was to use Saving Throws. In that game, you needed to make a save whenever you used "Grey" magic (mental manipulation, illusionist, transfiguration spells) and "Black" magic (direct damage, destruction, necromancy). A failed save on casting Grey magic would cost you HP. A failed save on casting Black magic would cause you to lose Sanity. One could rejigger this to something like: * No more spell slots, but a Magic User needs to make a save whenever he's trying to cast any spell, and failure means it won't go off. * No more spell slots, but a Magic User needs to make a save whenever he's trying to cast any spell, and failure means he can't use use that same spell again until the next Rest * A Magic User needs to make a save whenever he's trying to cast a spell, and failure means the spell slot is expended. Success means he gets to keep whatever is armed in his one spell slot! The other thing that game does is to get rid of Clerics entirely - all spellcasting is done by Magic-Users (and Thieves reading scrolls), and all magic is reclassified into the White / Grey / Black schools I mentioned, with most of the buffing/healing going to the White school.
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Dec 31, 2014 06:31
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gradenko_2000 posted:The other thing that game does is to get rid of Clerics entirely - all spellcasting is done by Magic-Users (and Thieves reading scrolls), and all magic is reclassified into the White / Grey / Black schools I mentioned, with most of the buffing/healing going to the White school.
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Dec 31, 2014 06:39
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gradenko_2000 posted:Going back to the topic of low-level Magic-Users and their lack of spells, a neat little mechanic I picked up from Crypts and Things was to use Saving Throws. In that game, you needed to make a save whenever you used "Grey" magic (mental manipulation, illusionist, transfiguration spells) and "Black" magic (direct damage, destruction, necromancy). Huh, that's a pretty neat set-up. Does Crypts & Things have equally neat stuff for fighty types?
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Dec 31, 2014 06:42
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Evil Mastermind posted:Huh, that's a pretty neat set-up. Does Crypts & Things have equally neat stuff for fighty types? It splits up martial classes into Fighters and Barbarians. Fighter: 1d6+2 HP per level Best attack bonus scaling: +6 by level 9 Worse saving throw: 16 at level 1, 8 at level 9, caps out at 6 Against targets with 1 hit die or less, an extra attack per character level, per round Can choose between multiple Fighting Styles: Berserker lets you enter a rage that gives a +2 bonus to attack and damage rolls for an entire combat, at the cost of -2 AC during the rage and a -2 to every roll after the combat until you rest off the exhaustion Shield Master gives a +1 bonus to AC while using a shield Swashbuckler gives a +2 bonus to AC and a +1 bonus to attack rolls while wearing light armor and not using a shield nor a large weapon Unarmed Combat upgrades the damage dice of unarmed attacks to d6, then later d8 Weapon Master gives a +1 bonus to attack and damage rolls with a particular weapon type. This can be upgraded to Weapon Grandmaster for +2/+2 The gimmick is that you select two of these at level 1, and can select 3 more as you level, so you can be a Berserker AND a swashbuckling fistpuncher that can change to a shield. Perhaps not as flashy as it could be, but there's a lot here for what's supposed to be an OD&D retroclone. Barbarians: 1d6+1 HP per level Slightly worse attack bonus scaling: +4 by level 9 Best saving throw: 14 at level 1, 6 at level 9, caps out at 4 +3 bonus to saving throws against disease and poison +1 bonus to AC The very first attack roll of an encounter will have a +2 bonus, and will do double damage if it hits Several bonus to Barbarian-related skills in the game's skill system: climbing walls, perception, stealth, sense danger, tracking === The final thing I want to mention is the HP system: 1d6+2 for a Fighter is somewhat less than a d12 in the original game, but since Crypts and Things is supposed to be a swords-and-sorcery type game in the vein of Conan, Kull and Gray Mouser, if you get to 0 HP, you fight on with a -2 penalty to everything. Any further damage you take goes to your CON score (temporarily for that combat), and you only really die once your CON hits 0 as well. So assuming max HP at level 1, a Fighter here is really fighting with something like ~19 HP. He just has a penalty after losing the first 8 HP. === EDIT: The other other I want to mention is the game's skill system: Roll your saving throw, add the modifier from the closest relevant attribute. So a level 1 Barbarian with 18 STR trying to jump a chasm would be rolling d20 + 3 and trying to get a 14 or higher, while a Fighter doing the same would be trying to get a 16 or higher. And then maybe the DM can put a -2 modifier if the precipice is slippery or something. Simple enough - tasks do get easier and easier as you level up, but one could explain that away as these bigger larger than life heroes that would eventually have zero trouble smashing a door anyway. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 09:40 on Dec 31, 2014 |
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Dec 31, 2014 07:43
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Halloween Jack posted:The tables and such in Basic were pretty generous with items too, weren't they? Even if most of what you get is potions. They were also much kinder to lower-level and non-magical characters than the OD&D or AD&D treasure tables, especially once you get to the Rules Cyclopedia. The RC random treasure tables are full of relatively common things like silver weapons, arrows with magical utility talents imbued into them, and armors that could ameliorate the effects of cursed items or level drain - things that would have made a low(ish)-level AD&D game much more survivable if playing with the rulebook as written, and certainly more interesting if you weren't interested in the arbitrary and high-lethality style of gameplay suggested by AD&D's own text.
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Dec 31, 2014 08:58
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Related to Fighter-chat, at some point in another discussion a long time ago someone threw out the idea that at a certain level a Fighter should just be able to deal their damage as hit dice instead of hit points, so when at lower levels you'll be dealing 1d10+STR damage to a single target with an attack at higher levels when fighting against a bunch of mooks you'd just roll 1d10+STR and that number of hit dice of creatures would end up dead. If fighting against a single target with lots of hit dice you'd basically reduce their number of hit dice by the number you rolled. This was basically a tangential thought I had a long time ago that never amounted to much, but I started extrapolating stuff like every character having abilities that could be expressed through hit dice: the Rogue's sneak attack would deal hit dice instead of hit points in damage, the Cleric's healing spells would be all about recovering your friends' lost hit dice and letting them reroll them and Wizard spells would be expressed through how many hit dice they affected. Might have to start working on this again to see what I come up with.
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Dec 31, 2014 12:53
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Scarlet Heroes does exactly that: 1. roll your attack 2. if you hit, roll your weapon's damage die (plus STR, etc) 3. if the result is 2 to 5, you deal 1 HD worth of damage 4. if the result is 6 to 9, you deal 2 HD worth of damage 5. if the result is 10+, you deal 4 HD worth of damage and this damage can "cleave". That is, if you're facing a 3 HD Ogre and a 1 HD goblin and you roll an 11 for damage, you can kill both the Ogre and the Goblin in the same attack (provided that the attack roll can hit both of them) That said, this is more because the system is supposed to allow a single character to play through OSR adventures that were originally designed for entire parties, and less about giving the Fighter a powerful ability at high levels. It's definitely an interesting line of attack, though.
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Dec 31, 2014 13:00
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gradenko_2000 posted:Going back to the topic of low-level Magic-Users and their lack of spells, a neat little mechanic I picked up from Crypts and Things was to use Saving Throws. In that game, you needed to make a save whenever you used "Grey" magic (mental manipulation, illusionist, transfiguration spells) and "Black" magic (direct damage, destruction, necromancy). Dungeon Crawl Classics does something similar with Corruption for spell casters. Rolling too low while casting could mean over time even your body/appearance manifests the corruption and you end up with twisted limbs, or kitten knees.
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Dec 31, 2014 17:15
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gradenko_2000 posted:Going back to the topic of low-level Magic-Users and their lack of spells, a neat little mechanic I picked up from Crypts and Things was to use Saving Throws. In that game, you needed to make a save whenever you used "Grey" magic (mental manipulation, illusionist, transfiguration spells) and "Black" magic (direct damage, destruction, necromancy). That sounds pretty cool - though I imagine they seriously altered the spell list in order to not completely screw the balance if caster's could potentially toss out spells every round without consuming any resources (except for possibly HP/Sanity of course). Is the damage for failure dependent on the level of spell? I think I figured out how to get generic spell slots to work - the results give similar limits to normal Vancian casting, but with fewer spell slots in total available to work with. Basically a Magic User gets 1 spell slot at 1st level and gains an extra one every level (max level in the game would be 10, so 10 possible spells prepared in total). They'd get access to higher level spell every odd level, maxing out at 5th level spells. The maximum number of spells of any given level that they could prepare is equal to their character level/spell level. So a 3rd level character could prepare 3 spells total per day, but only one of them could be a 2nd level spell. So a 10th level caster could prepare up to 10 total spells in one day and do it as a combination of up to: Ten 1st level spells, five 2nd level spells, three 3rd level spells, two 4th level spells & two 5th level spells. Also, is it just me or is the word 'Level' used way too often in D&D? Why didn't they just classify spells by Ranks? Or characters by Ranks?
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Jan 1, 2015 01:36
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Bob Quixote posted:Also, is it just me or is the word 'Level' used way too often in D&D? Why didn't they just classify spells by Ranks? Or characters by Ranks? The fact that you have characters that go up to "character level" 20-30, but you spells that only go up to "spell level" 9, and they don't ever match, is a one of D&D long-time traditionalist semantic boondoggles
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Jan 1, 2015 01:42
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For that sanity system: is it permanent? Whats the actual cost/trade-off?
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Jan 1, 2015 01:47
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Bob Quixote posted:Also, is it just me or is the word 'Level' used way too often in D&D? Why didn't they just classify spells by Ranks? Or characters by Ranks? Yes, yes it is. There's an explanation of why, but I can't currently find it. It's either in the BECMI basic books (which I don't have to hand right now) or the AD&D DMG and a quick flip through didn't find it and I've got better things to do today than wade through that looking for that one half paragraph. I think the original idea was Dungeon level Character rank and Spell order but it somehow got more complicated than that. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 04:45 on Jan 1, 2015 |
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Jan 1, 2015 04:42
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Bob Quixote posted:That sounds pretty cool - though I imagine they seriously altered the spell list in order to not completely screw the balance if caster's could potentially toss out spells every round without consuming any resources (except for possibly HP/Sanity of course). Is the damage for failure dependent on the level of spell? FRINGE posted:For that sanity system: is it permanent? Whats the actual cost/trade-off? * To be clear, C&T still has spell slots - the saving throw is when you cast a Grey/Black magic spell using the spell slot. The idea of using saving throws to obviate spell slots was just me. * If you fail the saving throw on a Grey magic spell, you lose 2 HP per spell level * Characters have Sanity equal to their Wisdom. Whenever they witness something particularly horrible, they have to make a saving throw or lose 1d6 Sanity. If you hit 0 Sanity, you're insane and according to the rules are either under the DM's control or are incapacitated until your Sanity becomes positive. Any further Sanity loss is taken directly out of your WIS score and cannot be recovered. A character with 2 WIS or less is considered permanently insane and is unplayable Sanity recovers at the rate of 1 point per day of rest. The Restoration spell can recover Sanity, but not lost WIS points. If you fail the saving throw on a Black magic spell, you lose 1 Sanity per spell level. If you roll a 1 on the d20, you lose 1 WIS permanently.
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Jan 1, 2015 05:53
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With regard to getting rid of thieves and clerics, I think it would be cool to do something with the concept of classes based on story role. So the Fighter would be the up and coming hero, the sort of Luke Skywalker with thief things, whereas the Wizard would be Kenobi or Yoda with cleric things. I think it would definitely help to introduce people to roleplaying in a simple way they can understand. Plus you could have a sort of genealogical saga, where the Wizard dies about half way through, the Fighter gets a Hero's Journey type boon from it, and eventually becomes the Wizard training his own Fighter. Possible connection to JRPGs where the Fighter levels up into a Paladin. In my own homebrew heartbreaker dilly, the classes are Humble Man, the Hobbits, peasants, curious scholars, etc. Usually works out the way halflings do, with less capability but more luck and less temptation. Fallen Man, the Aragorns, John Carters and other such types who are more skilled but also more easily tempted. Sorcerer, the Gandalfs, Dumbledores, Klarkash-tons, who pay sanity for spells. If you're a good guy (more restricted) Sorcerer the insanity penalties can be turned into muttering, making fireworks, talking to animals, and general harmless weirdness.
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Jan 1, 2015 08:37
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Soggy Cereal posted:With regard to getting rid of thieves and clerics, I think it would be cool to do something with the concept of classes based on story role. So the Fighter would be the up and coming hero, the sort of Luke Skywalker with thief things, whereas the Wizard would be Kenobi or Yoda with cleric things. I think it would definitely help to introduce people to roleplaying in a simple way they can understand. Plus you could have a sort of genealogical saga, where the Wizard dies about half way through, the Fighter gets a Hero's Journey type boon from it, and eventually becomes the Wizard training his own Fighter. Possible connection to JRPGs where the Fighter levels up into a Paladin. Yeah, I can definitely get behind the classes having specific story roles. Actually, I was just thinking about that, but in a kinda different direction. I said this in the Chat Thread, but Big Trouble in Little China is basically the best D&D movie ever made for this reason. I think it's appropriate to this thread too, so I'll just quote myself. Lightning Lord posted:Wang is the Fighter. Jack is the Rogue. Egg is the Wizard. However, unlike a lot of D&D, they all have equal power in influencing the narrative. It's not like Egg is stopping time while Wang just stands around slapping one guy at a time. Well, maybe Wang has more influence, since he is the Hero, and Jack kind of wandered in from another movie. But they all use their expertise and play their roles. Jack uses his reflexes and wit to help win the day, shows an incredible skill at recovering from gently caress ups, and can even turn his blundering to his advantage. Wang basically rules the house, beats the poo poo out of everybody and uses his physical prowess to influence the narrative of the story. He does crazy martial arts to these supernatural freaks and just beats them by being that good. Egg Knows poo poo™ and blows dudes up with his powers, and gets into a special effects wizard duel. Most of the film is a dungeon crawl in a ghost lich's lair, where halfway through the party retreats to rest and resupply and comes back in greater force, with better equipment and henchmen. It's nuts how Big Trouble maps to a really good D&D game. I'm sure I'm forgetting something. Which lead me to think about how I'd go about applying this to gaming. Lightning Lord posted:It's inspired me to look into making some modular retroclone-y type rules where instead of Fighters just having attack mode, Fighters specifically get narrative abilities to do poo poo. Sort of like the Mighty Deeds of Arms mechanic from Dungeon Crawl Classics, but with a bit more player agency hardwired in. Basically codify Fighter being for people who like making poo poo up and Wizard for those who like picking from lists of specific powers. Maybe that's kind of reinventing the wheel but I dunno, seems worthwhile to think about. I'd have to go at it a bit more but I think we can inject some extra narrative support into making the classes good at what they're supposed to be good at, as well as making them distinct choices of playstyles in a positive way, without just adjourning and playing Dungeon World. Lightning Lord fucked around with this message at 09:26 on Jan 1, 2015 |
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Jan 1, 2015 09:20
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I really like the Mighty Deed Die as a concept, but the odd die sizes make it impractical to use unless you're running a game online / with a digital die roller. D&D Next's Proficiency Die mechanic does limit the dies to d4 / d6 / d8 / d10 / d12 spread over 20 levels, with the die size increasing every 4th level, but I don't know how well that'd play outside of Next's specific scaling design.
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Jan 1, 2015 09:55
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gradenko_2000 posted:I really like the Mighty Deed Die as a concept, but the odd die sizes make it impractical to use unless you're running a game online / with a digital die roller. Purple Sorcerer has made a die roller/rules app specifically for DCC and it's really getting easier to acquire the funky dice. Koplow Games have a set that's like $6-$7 (except the d14 for some reason, but that's an extra $1.50) now. It's still a bit of a pain but it's not the excruciating horror it was when DCC was brand new. (for example http://www.amazon.com/Green-Special-Who-Knew-Dice/dp/B00FQV76E6 ) Lightning Lord fucked around with this message at 10:08 on Jan 1, 2015 |
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Jan 1, 2015 09:59
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Lightning Lord posted:Purple Sorcerer has made a die roller/rules app specifically for DCC and it's really getting easier to acquire the funky dice. Koplow Games have a set that's like $6-$7 (except the d14 for some reason, but that's an extra $1.50) now. It's still a bit of a pain but it's not the excruciating horror it was when DCC was brand new. Huh, that's really cool. I may have to give DCC another read-through.
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Jan 1, 2015 11:36
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Lightning Lord posted:It's inspired me to look into making some modular retroclone-y type rules where instead of Fighters just having attack mode, Fighters specifically get narrative abilities to do poo poo. Sort of like the Mighty Deeds of Arms mechanic from Dungeon Crawl Classics, but with a bit more player agency hardwired in. Basically codify Fighter being for people who like making poo poo up and Wizard for those who like picking from lists of specific powers. Maybe that's kind of reinventing the wheel but I dunno, seems worthwhile to think about. gradenko_2000 posted:I really like the Mighty Deed Die as a concept, but the odd die sizes make it impractical to use unless you're running a game online / with a digital die roller. I'm in favor of having mechanics that allow Fighters to be able to take actions to control the narrative in combat - fixes like that would go a long way to making the class more fun in general. I'm not a big fan of variable dice based attack bonuses though - I get that they average out to about the same thing as flat bonuses if you space them right, but it's got to be really irritating as a high level attacker with +d12 to hit and then end up rolling a '1' as opposed to just taking the flat +7. The 3.5 Grapple/Trip/Disarm mechanics kind of left a bad taste in my mouth since they were needlessly complex and made anything you attempted beyond a standard attack come at both a heavy penalty (making them unlikely to actually work unless you'd specifically made a build for it) and at a cost to your DPR as well which sort of reduced your utility overall. I want to make called-shot/deeds style attacks work on a simple framework - you declare your attempted action (disarm, shove, trip, blind, etc.) against your target, roll a standard attack with no penalties & on a hit you deal 1/2 your normal damage & they have to make a Save or suffer the effect of your declared action (with the added caveat that if your Attack/To Hit total was greater than their Save total your effect still happens anyway). Since the Fighters attack bonus increases about as fast, or faster, than the Save tables it means you should be able to reliably pull it off a decent amount of times against enemies of your own level, and easily clown weak/low HD opponents if you don't feel like just splattering them outright.
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Jan 1, 2015 16:27
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gradenko_2000 posted:I really like the Mighty Deed Die as a concept, but the odd die sizes make it impractical to use unless you're running a game online / with a digital die roller. d3 is d6/2 and d5 is d10/2, so it's only actually a problem when you hit d7. In other 'sort of a retroclone' news, I just got a copy of Torchbearer and it is amazing but I think it's way too crunchy for me and my gaming group. I want to steal things from it badly. What are some things I can take away that don't totally fall apart when removed from the burning wheel system?
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Jan 1, 2015 18:01
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I'm in a similar boat with Torchbearer. The thing I wanted to steal, and sort of did in a design sense for a project that keeps coming up and going down, is the idea of characters receiving conditions under certain circumstances. Maybe you want to keep the Torchbearer death spiral in some fashion. I could see it being translated to a few other systems with possibly a need to re-jigger it in the process, but I think it holds. Basically, the conditions and the notion of there being a clear distinction between town and wilderness/dungeon and maybe you can do specific things in each makes sense, but it also might be redundant for the way a lot of folks play.
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Jan 1, 2015 20:28
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For anyone who owns this version of the Basic set (the 1983 edition) from DTRPG/DnDClassics, does it include both the player and DM halves of the book?
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Jan 3, 2015 10:25
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gradenko_2000 posted:For anyone who owns this version of the Basic set (the 1983 edition) from DTRPG/DnDClassics, does it include both the player and DM halves of the book? The Mentzer Basic set is two physical books. That's just the DM's book. Here's the player's book: http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/116578/DD-Basic-Set--Players-Manual-BECMI-ed-Basic Separating those out into two books for the PDF version is shady as gently caress. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 10:30 on Jan 3, 2015 |
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Jan 3, 2015 10:27
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I was going back and forth between the various BECMI and retroclone docs today, trying to find inspiration for smoothing out the "jumps" in attack bonuses, when I noticed that where it goes [+1,+3,+6,+8,+10] in the (Basic and) Expert sets, it goes [+1,+3,+5,+7,+9] in the Companion and Master sets and in the Rules Cyclopedia. I got curious and included Labyrinth Lord and Dark Dungeons into the comparison, since the former is supposed to be a B/X clone, and the latter is supposed to be Rules Cyclopedia clone (all other games are easier based on a different version or have enough of their own changes). LL seems to have adopted the "smoothing" rather on-target.    I do wonder what the story is behind that change in the attack bonus/THAC0 curve right around "name" level.
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Jan 5, 2015 16:11
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(Except for thieves being bad at everything) has anyone ever been in a game and really been disturbed by THAC0 being off by a number? Of the various problems we worked around that one never really registered.
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Jan 5, 2015 20:48
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Bob Quixote posted:I want to make called-shot/deeds style attacks work on a simple framework - you declare your attempted action (disarm, shove, trip, blind, etc.) against your target, roll a standard attack with no penalties & on a hit you deal 1/2 your normal damage & they have to make a Save or suffer the effect of your declared action (with the added caveat that if your Attack/To Hit total was greater than their Save total your effect still happens anyway). Since the Fighters attack bonus increases about as fast, or faster, than the Save tables it means you should be able to reliably pull it off a decent amount of times against enemies of your own level, and easily clown weak/low HD opponents if you don't feel like just splattering them outright. There was a great Super Simple Combat Maneuvers writeup that's basically that. Maneuvers are handled the same way as a regular attack and if they hit, the GM/player has to make the choice between taking the effect or taking regular damage.
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Jan 5, 2015 20:54
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FRINGE posted:(Except for thieves being bad at everything) has anyone ever been in a game and really been disturbed by THAC0 being off by a number? Well no, of course I don't think it really matters in actual gameplay, which is what made me curious why it was off by 1 in the first place if Companion/Master is supposed to be a continuation of B/X and Rules Cyclopedia is supposed to be a compilation of BECMI. Was there some kind of conscious design decision? Probably lost to the sands of time, but eh, you guys would know a lot more about such history.
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Jan 5, 2015 20:57
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I always wondered why the random loot tables are so different box to box. In theory, you would use the most recent one from the get-go, because it isn't like they are leveled up loot or anything.
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Jan 5, 2015 21:02
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Babylon Astronaut posted:I always wondered why the random loot tables are so different box to box. In theory, you would use the most recent one from the get-go, because it isn't like they are leveled up loot or anything. (I rarely used them, but thats my first thought.)
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Jan 5, 2015 21:17
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Doctor Goggles posted:There was a great Super Simple Combat Maneuvers writeup that's basically that. Maneuvers are handled the same way as a regular attack and if they hit, the GM/player has to make the choice between taking the effect or taking regular damage. I like how simple the mechanic is, though something about the DM being able to decide if the monster really gets disarmed/tripped/shoved off a cliff or just takes normal damage sort of gives me pause. It moves the mechanic away from "player declares a cool thing they are trying and then rolls to succeed" over to "player declares a cool thing they are trying and the DM decides whether it worked or not" (though the auto-success on a crit is nice). Though after looking at that article I'm thinking of re-working my combat maneuver thing to: 1) Declare maneuver and roll to hit, if you hit proceed to step two 2) Target attempts to save - if they fail or if your Attack roll > than their Save roll then your maneuver goes through as planned. If they make the save they take regular damage instead. 3) Critical hit equals automatic no-save maneuver success plus regular damage dealt to the target. I figure this would probably lead to martial characters declaring maneuvers a lot since there aren't any complicated sub-systems and no risk to their DPR for attempting them since even a fail counts as a standard attack - but I really like the idea since it means that they would be more invested in trying cool things in the middle of the fight as opposed to being resigned to declaring standard attacks every round for maximum efficiency.
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Jan 6, 2015 03:39
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I started a new game of B/X yesterday, and the way I've been doing it is: Declare the maneuver/stunt you want to do Roll equal or under the appropriate attribute to pull it off (and we ran with 4d6 drop lowest, so the Fighter is trying to aikido stirges with 12 STR) If you get it, it happens, also roll for a normal attack If you don't get it, roll for a normal attack I think the Simple Combat Maneuvers thing would also be okay if the player got to decide between the maneuver or the damage, and if you opened up the "gets both" clause to exceeding the needed attack roll by 3 or 4.
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Jan 6, 2015 04:21
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gradenko_2000 posted:I started a new game of B/X yesterday, and the way I've been doing it is: Interesting - so in your case a combat maneuver is something that happens in addition to a standard attack instead of replacing a standard attack during the players turn on the combat round? That sounds like it would work really well too - I should probably give both methods a shot and see which fits best with my players since they are the ones who would be using it after all.
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Jan 6, 2015 04:44
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I wonder if it would be any fun to make simple casters by giving them choices for magic at-will attacks and then making a Weapons Mastery style bonus chart that would give it better abilities as they leveled.
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Jan 6, 2015 04:57
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Bob Quixote posted:Interesting - so in your case a combat maneuver is something that happens in addition to a standard attack instead of replacing a standard attack during the players turn on the combat round? Yup, I'm hedging my bets a bit because it can be difficult to adjudicate whether an effect you're creating is more or less valuable than simply dealing damage. Mormon Star Wars posted:I wonder if it would be any fun to make simple casters by giving them choices for magic at-will attacks and then making a Weapons Mastery style bonus chart that would give it better abilities as they leveled. I want to do this as well - it's just somewhat daunting to come up with an entire system whole cloth. The most basic idea that comes to mind is that trying to hit a single monster uses a d6 damage dice, while trying to hit someone with an AOE (because everyone I've ever played with has the expectation that the caster can perform AOE) uses a d4 (or even a d3?). And then the player just declares whatever "element" they're shooting with. The next question would be if the caster has to pass through AC to hit (might require giving the caster better attack roll progression) or has to pass through some sort of "Magic Defense" stat, and how the latter would be computed if it did (old-school saving throws might not work because it keeps getting better and better at the caster's expense) gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 05:05 on Jan 6, 2015 |
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Jan 6, 2015 04:59
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| # ? Jun 5, 2024 23:32 |
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So, apparently Dwimmermount's Labyrinth Lord edition got released to backers many months ago and I hadn't even noticed it because I'd just sort of zoned out due to the sheer volume of backer updates. The PDF edition is also available on RPGNow. Just started reading it last night and even though I'm no longer really in the market for an old school megadungeon I think it was tenbux well spent if only for the interesting world-building. The most interesting bit I ran into was the one bit about dwarves: they basically breed asexually. The text oddly calls out that all dwarves are male which makes no sense due to the fact that they procreate asexually so I'm not sure why they just didn't say that, but what comes after is interesting: when a dwarf wants to procreate they basically build their child by carving it out of rock and then breathing life into it. If you roll a natural 1 during this process there's a chance that your progeny will come out a gnome, a kobold or a stillborn lifeless statue. The point is, all kobolds and gnomes in this assumed setting are actually offshoots of dwarves. It actually reminds me of a joke we made up when playing WFRP 2e: all dwarves in the game started with a talent called Dwarfcraft to represent their superior craftsmanship and my friends and I once joked that dwarves actually procreate by crafting their children out of the rock. (Which was doubly funny because one way you can phrase this in Finnish is also a testicle-related pun.) Anyway, so that's pretty cool and I might borrow that bit if I'm ever in a campaign featuring lots of dwarves. I also liked the rival party mechanic: basically, every time you pack up and go to rest and resupply in town the DM should roll d% for all the rooms you've yet to explore on that level, with a cumulative +2% for each successive time you've left the dungeon. Results of 1-80 mean the room has been undisturbed, higher results mean that there are signs of another adventuring party having been there and the highest results being stuff like catching the other party mid-combat with whatever monsters are situated in that room. I'm not sure if I'll run this dungeon as written, but it has given me a hankering to run a Labyrinth Lord megadungeon at some point.
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Jan 6, 2015 12:06
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