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Ratpick posted:Yeah, even that might be a bit too harsh without giving other characters some way to protect spellcasters. To be fair, Magic-Users in B/X have it hard enough as it is, so coming up with cumbersome rules to screw them out of spell-casting might not be worth it. Yep, nobody wanted to be the wizard back in the day. I used to try to fix it in BECMI (in the B and E levels) by giving MUs a "magic dart" spell that worked like a regular attack. 15' range, 1d6 damage, goes off in missile phase, needs an attack roll to hit. Yeah, just like a basic attack cantrip in later editions. The way I ran it was that if you could do something with a dart, you could do it with this spell. So it could knock stuff over, break glass, etc and generally be pretty useful, but you needed to have your wizard staff to be able to do it. Not like a magic item, just a wizard staff. Because it doesn't work without one. Because it's magic. Any staff you're holding counts. Okay fine the material component is a staff or improvised staff and it isn't consumed in the casting*. It doesn't make them suddenly OP because they still have 1d4hp/level and no armour, but it does let them wizard the place up a bit more than they otherwise get to. *Here I'm paraphrasing my half of the conversation with that guy. I just didn't like the idea of an undetectable weapon as a default class feature and I thought a wizard staff being necessary was a thematic solution. I think we were like 12 or 13. (And yeah, material components are an AD&D thing, and while I had those books I always had more fun running BECMI. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 10:58 on Nov 28, 2016 |
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Nov 28, 2016 10:50
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I did that too, except mine was 1d4 for damage and the MU could add their Intelligence modifier to the attack roll. And then for an AD&D game, I let the MU earn a "Gnomish Dart Projector" which was a wrist-mounted device that combined steam technology with a Vial of Everflowing Water to manufacture and shoot an infinite amount of darts, forever.
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Nov 28, 2016 11:00
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If you want to do individual initiative, just have players declare actions and then roll initiative. Spellcasting begins at the beginning of the round and finishes once the spellcaster's turn comes up. Anyone who declares before monsters gets +1 to the roll.
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Nov 28, 2016 11:06
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Siivola posted:If you want to do individual initiative, just have players declare actions and then roll initiative. Spellcasting begins at the beginning of the round and finishes once the spellcaster's turn comes up. Anyone who declares before monsters gets +1 to the roll. I think that was the approach to individual initiative proposed in Rules Cyclopedia or something? Can't say I'm a fan. Rolling initiative each round is alright when it's just Team Player versus Team Monster, but rolling individual initiative for each player separately each round would be tedious to keep track of. The more I think about it the more I just want to use individual initiative without any of the hassle involved with having to account for corner cases like disrupting spellcasting. Readied actions can be used to account for the chance of disrupting a spell, and even without readied action there's always the off chance that a monster with the same initiative count gets a simultaneous action and manages to attack the magic-user just as they're casting. That's more than enough for me, because I still want to keep it simple. I also might consider stealing that magic dart thing from gradenko_2000 and AlphaDog, because as you guys said it probably won't break the game but allow the Magic-User to feel more magical.
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Nov 28, 2016 11:39
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Siivola posted:If you want to do individual initiative, just have players declare actions and then roll initiative. Spellcasting begins at the beginning of the round and finishes once the spellcaster's turn comes up. Anyone who declares before monsters gets +1 to the roll. Yeah, that works and it's similar to Hackmaster's system. Without the fiddliness. In HM4e, unless you say "SPELL!" as soon as the GM calls for initiative, you're not casting that round, spells have casting times, weapons have speed, fatigue is a factor, etc. But just "you gotta declare a cast at the start" works real well in BECMI too. I'd forgotten all about doing it like that outside hackmaster. E: Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 11:52 on Nov 28, 2016 |
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Nov 28, 2016 11:39
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AlphaDog posted:E: Isn't that the default in BECMI? It might be, my memory of it is hazy at best. The differences between B/X and Rules Cyclopedia are often so fine that I confuse them with each other. Even in vanilla B/X I think the assumption is that actions are announced first, then initiative is rolled (although by default B/X uses Team Initiative) and then actions take place in initiative order. To be quite honest I've never been a huge fan of announcing actions first and then rolling initiative, because it takes away some of the immediacy from the action.
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Nov 28, 2016 12:04
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I think it's the default in Advanced or 2e, except in the original players declaring after monsters get -1 to initiative. Here's a question, though: What does roll-once initiative add to the game? If you allow delayed actions, it works out basically the same as group initiative anyway because players can group up to dunk on monsters at their leisure. What's a "quick change in the flow of battle"? Edit: I mean, if you want immediacy, just go the Dungeon World route and ditch initiative altogether. Retro games generally don't have robust enough an action economy to actually need it. Siivola fucked around with this message at 12:16 on Nov 28, 2016 |
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Nov 28, 2016 12:11
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In B/X, using Moldvay as my reference, both "teams" roll a d6, and whoever rolled higher does all of their actions first, but the actions themselves are in the order of Movement -> Missiles -> Magic -> Melee. (I suspect, but am not sure, that the division of these actions into these phases has as much to do with giving players a clear process to follow than with play-balance) Rules Cyclopedia says the same thing, and the Individual Initiative Optional Rule is still the same thing: each individual character/creature rolls a d6, whoever rolls highest goes first. Ties are resolved simultaneously, but the Movement -> Missiles -> Magic -> Melee phases are still observed, so if two people are going off on Initiative 4, the person who shoots their bow still goes ahead of the person going to swing their sword. It's Dark/Darker Dungeons that added an extra dimension to initiative: If you declare your action before the monsters do, you get a +2 to initiative. You have a better chance of going first, but whatever you say you're doing isn't informed by the DM telling you what the monsters are about to do. If you declare your action after the monsters do, you get a -2 to initiative. You get to react with this new information of what the monsters are doing, but you increase your chances of going after them anyway.
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Nov 28, 2016 12:23
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The dark dungeons way is a good way to do it. According to Mentzer, announcing your intent like that was supposed to get into the rules cyclopedia. Rolling initiative every round isn't that bad when everyone already knows what they are doing and some people will have +6 to initiative, and some people will go last automatically. It is easy in play.
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Nov 28, 2016 12:42
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Siivola posted:Here's a question, though: What does roll-once initiative add to the game? If you allow delayed actions, it works out basically the same as group initiative anyway because players can group up to dunk on monsters at their leisure. What's a "quick change in the flow of battle"? One thing roll-once initiative definitely does add to the game is simplicity of book-keeping: you roll your initiative once and that's your initiative for the rest of the combat. That's the main appeal of it, really. Secondly, as I said, it allows you to react to quick changes in the situation. The Magic-User just got charged by an orc and is at 1 hp, what do you do about it right now? It gives you an opportunity to react to that situation immediately. Also, there's an immediacy to "What do you do?" "I attack the orc" "Roll to hit" "I hit the orc" that you just don't get with declaring first, then rolling for initiative, then adjudicating actions. I mean, it has a lot to do with the fact that D&D was built from the ground up from essentially a tactical wargame where all actions were neatly ordered and even the adventuring party was more like a squad of soldiers who first declared their intention to murder all the dudes and only then went on to actually murder all the dudes because that's how it was done in tactical wargames of yore. There isn't a good flow and back and forth to it at least to me. But yeah, this is just me and I know for a fact that old-school D&D works perfectly fine as is, it's just a matter of personal preference. gradenko_2000 posted:In B/X, using Moldvay as my reference, both "teams" roll a d6, and whoever rolled higher does all of their actions first, but the actions themselves are in the order of Movement -> Missiles -> Magic -> Melee. One idea I've toyed around with before was to keep the phases and then having initiative determine who goes first in which phase. So, if it's important to know whether the orcs or the Elf shoot first in the missile phase, then you roll initiative in the missile phase. If it's important to know whether the Dwarf gets to hit the orcs first, then you roll initiative in the melee phase. Incidentally, this is exactly how Old School Hack (my favorite indie hack and slash RPG) does it, and while it does also suffer from the aforementioned lack of immediacy it's a fun enough action game in and of itself for me to overlook that fact. EDIT: Oh, and for the record, I'm working from the assumption that initiative is still d6 with at most a +2 or -2 from Dexterity to the roll, giving a relatively narrow band of numbers. With simultaneous initiative scores I'll probably do the Movement -> Missiles -> Magic -> Melee thing (although I feel Melee should happen before Magic just so there's that small chance of disrupting spell-casting). Ratpick fucked around with this message at 12:56 on Nov 28, 2016 |
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Nov 28, 2016 12:48
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Personally, I like the "right here's the plan – aw, crud" dynamic of the announce-then-roll initiative, where inconvenient initiative rolls throw a spanner in the works. I see what you're getting at, though.Ratpick posted:Secondly, as I said, it allows you to react to quick changes in the situation. The Magic-User just got charged by an orc and is at 1 hp, what do you do about it right now? It gives you an opportunity to react to that situation immediately. If you want tense situations like that, I honestly think it'd be easier to ditch initiative and play it by ear. Scrape and Evil Mastermind addressed this in their DW guide, skip to page 10: Link.
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Nov 28, 2016 13:28
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This is just me, but what I usually do is to regularly announce what my monsters are about to do anyway, so that the players can plan accordingly. I find that it makes for a more interactive experience to say "the Orc is about to charge the Mage!" and watch the players react to it, rather than having them react to the Orc already having charged and already having reduced the Mage to 1 HP to begin with. It sort of dovetails well with best-practices from MMORPGs where pretty much any boss has a charge-up for their spell or a timer for their special ability or a telegraphed yell for their phase change so that players can play with it.
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Nov 28, 2016 13:42
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I'm really coming around to liking the team-huddle type initiative system, where everyone picks their actions for the round as a group before actually executing them. I think the way I'd run it these days is something like this: First, the DM says what the monsters/npcs are going to do this round. Then the players decide what they're doing. Then you roll initiative, either as a group or individually. Optionally, the players can choose their actions first, without knowing what the enemies are doing, in exchange for an initiative bonus. By starting each round with 'these two orcs are trying to push past the line to get at the wizard, these two are falling back to fire arrows, these two are protecting their mage as he starts chanting', you give the players more to react to and make decisions about.
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Nov 28, 2016 13:53
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Siivola posted:Personally, I like the "right here's the plan – aw, crud" dynamic of the announce-then-roll initiative, where inconvenient initiative rolls throw a spanner in the works. I see what you're getting at, though. Oh yeah, I know and have run Dungeon World lots of times and know that it works perfectly without initiative simply by swinging the spotlight to where it's needed the most. The approach works for Dungeon World and other PbtA games, but I feel that a lot of it also has to do with how the mechanics of those games are set up: you don't need an exact turn order in PbtA games because a lot of the stuff that would be handled with individual turn order are baked into the moves. In Dungeon World you don't need to do separate attacks for the player and the opposition because all of that is baked into the player-facing Hack and Slash move. That's not to say that you couldn't run regular D&D without initiative, but it'd just require a lot more adjudication and judgement calls from the DM. PbtA games lend themselves easily to this kind of gameplay because, as I said, the mechanics are entirely player-facing and bake in a lot of the back and forth of traditional RPGs, and thus they lend themselves naturally to combat where turn order is mostly a matter of swinging the spotlight. Now, D&D is, at least to me, a different kind of game, and especially when combat happens I'd much rather just let the random roll of the dice override my better judgement and sense of dramatic timing. Old school D&D is hella deadly and unfair to the players, and when I run it for my friends they go in with the knowledge that heads might roll. But my players accept that as part of the premise, and since I don't enjoy actively killing my friends' characters I need to have refuge in the fact that all their misfortunes can be attributed to the random whim of the dice. That means that when it's combat time it's time to roll initiative, because like hell am I going to swing the spotlight around when it might actually kill my friends' characters. Even though it leaves the dramatic timing squarely in the hands of the dice, I'm okay with that. But yeah, I understand that games can definitely work better without initiative. To me D&D isn't one of those games, because I run it as a straight-up dungeon-murder simulator, and when my friends' characters do get killed I want the responsibility for that as far away from my hands as possible. Also, fair point about announce-then-roll initiative making for an interesting dynamic. I may yet have to try running B/X with the rules as written again just to see whether it leads into those types of situations, but currently I'm leaning hard towards individual initiative. gradenko_2000 posted:This is just me, but what I usually do is to regularly announce what my monsters are about to do anyway, so that the players can plan accordingly. I find that it makes for a more interactive experience to say "the Orc is about to charge the Mage!" and watch the players react to it, rather than having them react to the Orc already having charged and already having reduced the Mage to 1 HP to begin with. Ratpick fucked around with this message at 14:29 on Nov 28, 2016 |
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Nov 28, 2016 14:17
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Also, my players tend to be awful about tuning out of the game entirely when it's not their turn, and only thinking about what they're going to do when I call their name. I want to try huddle initiative at least a couple times to try and shake them out of that bad habit a bit.
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Nov 28, 2016 21:28
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Tendales posted:I'm really coming around to liking the team-huddle type initiative system, where everyone picks their actions for the round as a group before actually executing them. I think the way I'd run it these days is something like this: It kinda ended up mashing together that way when I was first playing D&D. Bear in mind that I was 8 or 9 and I was the DM. The way I recall it working was: I say what the monsters are going to do. Players say what the characters are going to do. Group initiative is rolled. Combat resolves as per the guidelines. If you said you were gonna do something but now you can't because that bad guy's dead or something's blocked the area or whatever, you get to do something else instead, but you go last. "Last" is a FI/FO position so the first person to go "last" goes ahead of the second person to go "last" etc. This gives you a sort of consolation prize if your plan gets shat on, because you might be able to react to something that has come up this round. Maybe it's not the best way to do it, but it made sense to a bunch of pre-teens before the internet existed, so you know it's not over complicated. Example: Fighter, Cleric, Thief, and Halfling are trying to open a door with a window next to it. Thief and Halfling are low on hit points. An orc has appeared from his hiding spot and starts fighting them. DM says "The orc is trying to hit the Thief, who was closest to his hiding place." Fighter says "I hit the orc", Cleric says "Cure Light Wounds on Thief", Thief says "I hit the orc", and Halfling says "I pull this lever over here, maybe it opens the door!" Initiative is rolled. The orc goes first. The orc murders the thief. Two goblins appear in the nearby window. They don't get to go this round, but they're setting up a crossbow as big as themselves with weird attachments all over it. Cleric, Halfling, and Fighter could normally choose who goes next, but in this case, Thief is dead so Cleric's action can't resolve and they get moved to last. Fighter and Halfling choose between themselves who goes first. Fighter murders the orc. Halfling pulls the lever and opens the door. Cleric now gets to choose a different action, probably choosing to charge the goblin machine gunners through the now-open door. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 23:55 on Nov 28, 2016 |
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Nov 28, 2016 23:52
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I'm actually starting to warm up to the idea of group initiative after having thought about it and reading everyone else's points in favor of it. I'll give it a shot and if it works I'll stick to it and only revert to individual initiative if I don't find it to my liking. On a completely unrelated topic, I'm taking a page from the Angry GM's book and building "asset libraries" of monsters to populate my dungeons with. I've paraphrased this point before in this thread or another, but the basic idea is that instead of building dungeons so that you have Orc Room, Goblin Room, Zombie Room, Mushroom, you pick a small number of monsters and use those to populate an area or level of a dungeon, so that players can learn the tactics of monsters through play and then apply what they've learned in many different circumstances. As such, I've also looked at some monsters that aren't exactly monsters in the sense of things that hit you for damage until you die, but act more like hazards or obstacles, a little bit of extra spice you can throw into an encounter to make it more interesting than just the players hitting goblins until either side dies. I'm using Labyrinth Lord for reference: I don't have my B/X pdfs at hand so I don't know if there's a marked difference in the rules here. Bats in Labyrinth Lord are a pretty cool monster: they turn up in groups of 1d100, but they have no attacks. Their only "attack" is that when they're flying around everyone in the swarm is confused. Not confused as the spell though: confused in the sense that they take -2 to all saves and attacks while the bats are flying around. The bats are, however, skittish, and need to check morale every round, so chances are they'll only be an obstacle for one round before flying away. But throwing some bats into an encounter and saying "everyone's confused until the bats fly away" is dumb, because it's just a penalty for the first couple of rounds and if you just throw those bats out of nowhere there's nothing for the players to react to there. It's just like, "Oh, there's a dumb penalty in this combat encounter because of bats." So instead you have an encounter where the players can run into bats in unthreatening circumstances. Maybe the moment the PCs kick in the door to the dungeon a swarm of bats flies out, very confused about having been woken up in the middle of the day, and you the GM narrate it in a cool way like "Holy poo poo there's flying rats in your hair and eyes and gently caress this poo poo" and then you sneak in the mechanical "Everyone takes -2 to saves and attacks while these bats are flying around." It probably won't matter for that encounter, since the bats won't deal any damage and will just fly away once they fail their morale check, but it still informs the players about what bats do when they're around. Then when you throw a bunch of goblin bat-farmers at the players you first telegraph that fact: this part of the goblin warren has the distinct smell of bat guano to it, meaning that the players know in advance that there's bound to be bats. Then once the players rush in you release the bats, but you also reward whatever crazy idea the PCs may have for dealing with bats while fighting goblins: everyone who's watched movies knows that bats are afraid of fire, so maybe the bats won't approach the character with a lit torch, or maybe throwing a molotov cocktail at the bats will automatically force them to flee immediately or something. That's just one thing though. Shriekers (those drat shouty mushrooms) are another good example, they're not really a traditional monster but an extra complication that can basically alert more monsters and significantly change things for the worse for the players. Other than that, what other monsters are there that add some complication to combat beyond dealing damage until the characters die? I mean, it can deal damage normally, but I'm looking for monsters with abilities that complicate things a bit for the players without being completely dickish.
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Nov 30, 2016 09:23
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The most dangerous monster I have ever ran was the doppelganger plant, and it was a 15 mile radius that could turn anyone who slept there into a milkweed zombie. It was extremely hard to do fairly, but we had a great time fighting the evil pumpkin patch.
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Dec 1, 2016 02:23
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Babylon Astronaut posted:The most dangerous monster I have ever ran was the doppelganger plant, and it was a 15 mile radius that could turn anyone who slept there into a milkweed zombie. It was extremely hard to do fairly, but we had a great time fighting the evil pumpkin patch. Thanks. My players tomorrow are going to loving hate you.
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Dec 1, 2016 02:33
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Ratpick posted:Other than that, what other monsters are there that add some complication to combat beyond dealing damage until the characters die? I mean, it can deal damage normally, but I'm looking for monsters with abilities that complicate things a bit for the players without being completely dickish. "The walls, floor, and even ceiling here seem remarkably clean..." That's right! It's a Gelatinous Cube! Or rather, a set of them. But not ordinary ones - these are collectors rather than dissolvers. They live in alcoves in the hall where the fight's happening. If activated, they "clean the floor" in a pattern that makes sense for the room and encounter. Any thing or person on the floor in a space one moves through gets pulled back to its alcove. No damage done, but it'll be impossible for monsters or PCs to form any kind of coherent formation. There are two sorts. The first kind do the cleaning once when activated. It's a handy "sweep up!" button for the mad wizard's woodshop or whatever, and nothing important that might have fallen on the ground gets thrown out or dissolved. The second kind clean little-used areas. Unless deactivated, they do one cleaning sweep after something stays still in their work zone for more than 1 round. This keeps passageways, battlements, etc clear of debris, but doesn't bother anyone just walking through. They can still deal damage if you want. I just like the overengineering aspect. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 09:57 on Dec 1, 2016 |
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Dec 1, 2016 09:52
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AlphaDog posted:"The walls, floor, and even ceiling here seem remarkably clean..." Then theres the 58 of them that some old black dragon collected and altered. They contain its entire hoard while providing ideal scale-cleaning services.
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Dec 1, 2016 11:43
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AlphaDog posted:"The walls, floor, and even ceiling here seem remarkably clean..." This is fantastic, I'm definitely going to use this. I'm probably going to combine it with another idea I picked up from the Dungeon Alphabet, that kobolds are effectively dungeon custodians whose main purpose is to maintain dungeons; resetting traps, feeding monsters, repairing broken doors, refilling treasure hoards and so on. I could definitely see them using a gelatinous cube for cleaning certain areas. Incidentally, these kobolds have their own secret maintenance passages hidden behind secret doors, and they can only be encountered within thoses passages or in a room the PCs have previously visited and ransacked: there should probaby be like a 10% chance of the PCs encountering a group of kobolds doing maintenance work in a room they've already cleaned up, provided they have done something to change that room.
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Dec 1, 2016 13:34
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Hey, so, how about those older editions of D&D? I was reading the Angry GM's blog again the other day and he had a pretty great post about how travel in D&D is, frankly, a bit poo poo and boring. He wrote at length about the subject of making travel feel a bit more interesting, and there's a lot of great ideas there. Check it out: http://theangrygm.com/getting-there-is-half-the-fun/%B4 My main takeaway from the article is that random encounter tables are a bit one-note: most of them are just a list of monsters that you might run into in the woods, without lot of variety. Sure, you can also sometimes run into NPCs or traders or something, but for the most part it's monsters who want to kill you dead (or not, if the players roll well enough on the reaction). So what I'm basically doing is rewriting the old random encounter tables: for the most part I'm still sticking with encounters with monsters and NPCs, but even there said encounters can go different ways depending on what the players decide to do. However, what I'm also going to be doing is adding a few encounters that are not strictly speaking encounters but just serve to add a bit of color to travel: if there's a dragon living in the region the characters might find a merchant's wagon, completely burnt to crisp by the dragon. They might find a recent battlefield with dead goblins and orcs. Stuff that doesn't really warrant an encounter on its own but adds a bit of color (and if the players are willing to explore a bit might reveal new avenues for adventure: maybe the characters can find the dragon's lair or the warren of the goblins following one of the above encounters). In addition to this some of the entries on the charts are going to be environmental hazards: rockslides and avalanches in the mountains, sinkholes in swamps, even stuff like changing weather conditions. The final category of encounters I'll be throwing in is unique encounters: these are basically random encounters with a bit more love and care put into designing them. Instead of being just a random number of orcs or goblins or whatevert these are prefab encounters with some potential for further adventures, like meeting the last surviving member of a dwarven expedition to recover a small abandoned dwarven outpost (now overrun with monsters). All of his comrades are dead, killed by said monsters, but depending on how the characters approach him he might be willing to reveal to them the location of said outpost and promise them a large portion of the treasure found there if they help him clear it of monsters. For these unique encounters I'll just write up a bunch of them in advance and when a roll indicates a unique encounter I'll pick one of them at random, replacing it with a new one afterwards (if I want to get really clever I could have the new encounter build on the last unique encounter the characters resolved: let's say following the last encounter the characters decided that instead of helping out the dwarf for a large portion of the treasure they just intimidated the location of the outpost out of him and decided to raid the outpost for all the treasure, the next time the group rolls that result on the unique encounter table they encounter the same dwarf but this time he's brought his whole family, and they're understandably pissed off at the characters). Combined with some more interesting rules for exploration and travel I should end up with a situation where traveling from place A to place B is a bit more interesting than just checking for what kind of monsters might want to kill the PCs on the way. What I need a bit of help with is coming up with a good list of unique encounters.
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Dec 21, 2016 10:37
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So, guess who's running Godbound tonight for a small sub-set of his normal group who happens to still be in town and available this week? This guy. This guy riiiiight here.
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Dec 21, 2016 15:28
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dwarf74 posted:So, guess who's running Godbound tonight for a small sub-set of his normal group who happens to still be in town and available this week? That's going to be pretty fun. I've done a one-shot of the game and it is pretty legit. Just remember, only have them roll skills for poo poo gods would have trouble with.
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Dec 22, 2016 03:17
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I must admit I sort of missed out on Godbound back when it was announced. To my understanding it's basically a demigod-game in the vein of Exalted built on B/X D&D with some further ideas taken from Crawford's other games? Being by Crawford I assume it's got a focus on sandbox play. I've read Red Tide and Stars Without Number and both have some really great tools for building and running a sandbox game. How are the tools in Godbound for that sort of thing? And finally, does Godbound have any connection to the Red Tide setting?
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Dec 23, 2016 08:12
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It all started with Black Streams: Solo Heroes, a Labyrinth Lord-compatible supplement written by Crawford with rules modifications to allow characters to play through OSR-compatible adventures with just a single character. That would later lead to Scarlet Heroes, which used the Solo Heroes rules to make a full game using the Red Tide setting, with additional material to allow for GM-less as well as one-GM-one-player games. Now, one of the idiosyncrasies of the Solo Heroes rules is that because 1 point of damage dealt by a PC (or named/important NPC) equals one whole Hit Die of damage, while 1 point of damage dealt by a "normal" monster only deals back 1 HP of damage to the PC, you would get in-universe scenarios where individual PCs are capable of taking on dozens of normal monsters at a time. It gives the whole thing a very Dynasty Warriors feel if you ran with these setting assumptions and took them to their logical conclusion. Enter Exemplars and Eidolons. Crawford wanted to release a work that would show other people how to use InDesign to replicate the look of the Original D&D brown booklets, but instead of filling up the pages with Lorem Ipsum, he wrote a small-but-feature-complete game to go with it. E&E has a very super-charged fantasy hero/demigod vibe to it, because that's what it feels like is happening when you take a PC and make them capable of slaying hundreds of Orcs at a time with the Solo Heroes rules. Despite the fact that it was supposed to be just a side-project and a "demo" game to serve as page filler, enough people liked it that Crawford started writing Advanced Exemplars and Eidolons to flesh out the ideas of the game further, and when that was also well-received, he went full-bore on making an entire full-length game called Godbound, which expands on the demigodhood rules even further and comes with its own Exalted-type setting and even comes with some wink-wink-nudge-nudge conversion rules for Exalted.
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Dec 23, 2016 08:55
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Thanks for the summary. I'm already familiar with Solo Heroes and Scarlet Heroes (although I've only played the former) and have given Exemplars & Eidolons a look as well. I didn't know that Godbound was basically the last instalment in that "series" if you will. I might have to look at getting Godbound. The one time I ran Rules Cyclopedia D&D with the Solo Heroes rules (even though I had multiple players: we just went with the Solo Heroes rules because we wanted to evoke the vibe of Dynasty Warriors, wuxia and the like) it was a blast, and powering up the game so that everyone has divine powers on top of everything sounds extremely like my poo poo.
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Dec 23, 2016 09:06
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Well finally got my print copy of the Nightmares Underneath a couple of days ago and it might be one of the best RPG purchases I've made this year, as it's an absolutely gorgeous book that is very well written and is very evocative in both it's rules and fluff
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Dec 23, 2016 09:16
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A while back, I tried to trace the history of critical hits in D&D. Someone then pointed out that there were even earlier published rules for critical hits in Dragon Magazine #003, dating back to October 1976. This issue of Dragon is probably more (in)famous for Len Lakofka's "Bringing the Distaff Gamer into D&D" article, complete with seduction and charm rules for female characters, but later in the issue there's an article called "A Plethora of Obscure Sub-Classes" with various sub-class ideas written by other people. There's a note from Tim Kask as the Editor emphatically saying that none of these are to be considered official and may even be too powerful to use as classes for PCs. The one we're going to look at is the Samurai sub-class, credited to one Mike Childers and Jeff Kay. There are a number of special rules for this sub-class, such as having a minimum Dexterity requirement of 15, that they will have to hunt down anyone that dares take their Katana (longsword) away from them, special stats for Japanese-style armor, gaining additional points of Dexterity at certain experience levels, unarmed combat, and special stats for a Yumi (Japanese-style longbow), but what we're going to look at specifically are the critical hit charts. If: 1. The Samurai is wielding a Katana 2. Their attack roll is 8 higher than what is needed to hit their target OR the attack roll is a natural 20 They score a critical hit. They roll percentile dice and then consult the following possible results: 1 to 80: target loses 25% of max HP, or 6 HP, whichever is greater. Target also loses a limb - roll 1d4, with 1 = right arm, 2 = left arm, 3 = right leg, 4 = left leg 81 to 95: target loses 50% of max HP, or 12 HP, whichever is greater. Target also takes "a major body hit", though it is unclear what this means as the description of a major body hit is "no additional damage other than hit points" 96 to 100: target loses 100% of max HP "due to decapitation or other instant kill" If the Katana is a +1 Katana, then you only need to exceed the to-hit number by 7 to score a critical hit If the Katana is a +2 Katana, then you only need to exceed the to-hit number by 6 to score a critical hit, OR you need to roll a natural 19 or 20 If the Katana is a +3 Katana, then you only need to exceed the to-hit number by 5 to score a critical hit, OR you need to roll a natural 18, 19 or 20
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Dec 23, 2016 12:20
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Alexander Macris, of The Escapist and the Adventurer Conqueror King System also left a comment on my blog to throw in another note on the topic of multiple Fighter attacks versus 1 (or sub-1) Hit Die enemies. Apparently Dave Arneson had his own rule: whenever the Fighter kills something, they get to make another attack. Period. This was the rule Macris adopted for ACKS because handled the whole multiple-attacks-versus-massively-outleveled-enemies deal simply and cleanly: there is no massive gulf between a 1 HD and a 2 HD monster where suddenly your multiple attacks don't work against the latter anymore. There is similarly no complicated level-scaling mechanic to compute which monsters your multiple attacks will work against as you go up in Fighter levels. If you're strong enough to drop a kobold in one hit, then you'll be able to attack them multiple times. If you ever find yourself strong enough to drop even ogres in one hit, then you'll be able to do that as well. The multiple attacks will always scale as well as they should because it's based on actual performance. This rule probably also served as inspiration for the 3rd Ed Cleave -> Great Cleave feat chain, as it's much closer to replicating it than the way AD&D/Gygax did multiple Fighter attacks against "minions".
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Dec 23, 2016 15:39
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gradenko_2000 posted:Apparently Dave Arneson had his own rule: whenever the Fighter kills something, they get to make another attack. Period.
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Dec 23, 2016 20:37
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Covok posted:That's going to be pretty fun. I've done a one-shot of the game and it is pretty legit. Just remember, only have them roll skills for poo poo gods would have trouble with.
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Dec 23, 2016 20:43
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gradenko_2000 posted:The one we're going to look at is the Samurai sub-class, credited to one Mike Childers and Jeff Kay. Yikes. This is insane. Ratpick posted:What I need a bit of help with is coming up with a good list of unique encounters. What sort of thing are you looking for here?
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Dec 23, 2016 20:54
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gradenko_2000 posted:Alexander Macris, of The Escapist and the Adventurer Conqueror King System also left a comment on my blog to throw in another note on the topic of multiple Fighter attacks versus 1 (or sub-1) Hit Die enemies. Apparently Dave Arneson had his own rule: whenever the Fighter kills something, they get to make another attack. Period. Man I love ACKS' Cleave rules, as it helps make ACKS Fighters one of the absolute best in any OSR game, I tend to import a version of it into most OSR games I'd run(at least in theory)
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Dec 23, 2016 21:29
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DalaranJ posted:What sort of thing are you looking for here? Basically, what I want these unique encounters to do is to give new possible plot hooks: a random encounter is usually a self-contained scene that can be resolved in one encounter. What I want these unique encounters to do is to provide more possible avenues for exploration and interaction beyond "Okay, you killed the orcs, let's move on with the adventure." Basically, encounters that open up plots that take more than a single scene to resolve. Not necessarily fully fleshed out adventures, but they might reveal, say, a location where you can kill some monsters for a small reward or something. Another idea I had was discovering a Wizard who is stuck inside a summoning circle after failing to bind a minor demon. The demon is now running lose and probably headed towards the nearest civilization. The Wizard is only concerned with being freed and will reward the characters if they do so. The characters can also pursue the demon if they want to stop it from wreaking havoc. That's the sort of thing I'm looking for.
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Dec 24, 2016 07:44
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Ratpick posted:Basically, what I want these unique encounters to do is to give new possible plot hooks: a random encounter is usually a self-contained scene that can be resolved in one encounter. What I want these unique encounters to do is to provide more possible avenues for exploration and interaction beyond "Okay, you killed the orcs, let's move on with the adventure." Basically, encounters that open up plots that take more than a single scene to resolve.
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Dec 24, 2016 10:44
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Ratpick posted:Basically, what I want these unique encounters to do is to give new possible plot hooks: a random encounter is usually a self-contained scene that can be resolved in one encounter. What I want these unique encounters to do is to provide more possible avenues for exploration and interaction beyond "Okay, you killed the orcs, let's move on with the adventure." Basically, encounters that open up plots that take more than a single scene to resolve. Not necessarily fully fleshed out adventures, but they might reveal, say, a location where you can kill some monsters for a small reward or something. KODT has a regular column called Bait and Tackle that has capsule adventure hooks which might fit the bill. Dungeon magazine in the 3/3.5 era irregularly had side trek adventures which were one shots to drop into ongoing campaigns. I vaguely recall one of those being the pcs coming upon a cottage where someone had screwd up summoning an invisible stalker or air elemental. TSR's Book of Lairs series and Autarchs Lairs and Encounters book might fit the bill. As well several companies have done Treasure map type products as well - TSR, WOTC and Judge's Guild come to mind. OSR folks have also churned out a ton stuff that can be adapted to this sort of thing; the one page dungeons contests and lots of blog posts and pdf products for stocking hex crawl campaign maps. You'll have to extract the bits you want and extrapolate a some, but that's half the fun.
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Dec 24, 2016 17:33
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These were those things I was trying to remember. I never had a set, but if I remember correctly some of the cards were things like "you see a broken down wagon with (some kind of people)" and not just "3 orcs attack". https://www.amazon.com/Deck-Encounters-Advanced-Dungeons-Dragons/dp/1560769009
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Dec 24, 2016 20:13
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Has anyone here checked out/played The Nightmares Underneath? It reads like a mash up of B/X D&D, Dungeon World and Torchbearer. It seems pretty neat from my read through, but I haven't got to try it out yet.
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Dec 25, 2016 09:11
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