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Are there any retroclones that give Wizards/Mages a basic, "at-will" magical attack, similar to 4E, or is that already too different? Or, if I was going to hack up a mechanic myself, how might that work?
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Sep 3, 2014 08:37
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Payndz posted:I've been working on and off on a game derived from my own B/X retroclone (TAAC) that gives Wizards a few really minor at-wills, one of which is Magic Blast - 1d3 damage(d6/2) and requiring a ranged attack roll to hit. I wanted Wizards to have some way to attack that wasn't fists, a dagger or a stick (and therefore required them to get into melee, which at low levels is suicide), but at the same time keeping its damage and secondary effects limited. (I think having Fire Bolt as a cantrip in 5e - 1d10 fire damage with 120' range at-will - is way overpowered, and is just going to be spammed. Same with Ray Of Frost, which is only 1d8 damage but adds a no-save suck effect to compensate.) AlphaDog posted:If you're talking about AD&D or 2e, there's really no reason not to give the M-U some kind of at-will type attack that gives a small amount of damage out to a short kind of range*. The thing that might gently caress stuff up is if you write it as "fire" or "acid" or something and then it's going to have uses other than being an attack. Stick with "bolts of magic force". They'll break anything you could break with a thrown rock. Thanks for the input! I know the old way of dealing with this was just giving the Mage a sling or a crossbow, but I just wanted something that would allow a spellslinger to sling a spell as his worst-case attack option and for him to be able to use his INT stat instead of DEX. I think an attack roll + INT modifier and 1d3, 1d4 damage tops could be something I could play with.
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Sep 4, 2014 11:21
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My interest was piqued by a particular argument in the Next thread that supposedly one of the justifications for a Fighter lacking any sort of 4E-type martial ability in older D&D/BECMI was that he was supposed to gain lots of followers at higher-levels to make up for it. How was (or, if in present, how is) this played out? Do the followers get their own turns or is there systems to sort of aggregate them? Are there any retroclones that have particularly fleshed-out systems for this? How they're statted/equipped, how they level-up (if at all), how the Fighter picks them up and/or when does his followers replenish, and so on. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 09:10 on Sep 21, 2014 |
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Sep 21, 2014 09:07
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Payndz, you don't have PMs, so I have to ask here: I'm planning to run a game of There's Always A Chance * Can I confirm that Alpha 4 is the latest one? I got it off this list of retroclones * Thoughts on Fighters supposed to be having better saving throws than everyone else, if TAAC just derives them from attributes? * Rules Cyclopedia is what I should be referring to for the "OG", right?
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Sep 29, 2014 02:49
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Thanks for the response! We finished our first session a little after I made that post, one of the players made a Fighter and another a Wizard. Character creation was super-easy and we were done in 10-15 mins, although I house-ruled that they'd automatically get 13 for their STR and INT attibutes automatically and only have to do the 1d6+7 rolls for the rest since that's what they'd be wanting anyway. We played for about 2 hours, where I set them up to help some colonists in not-New England, taking some inspiration from Ross Payton's The New World campaign. Some cattle had gone missing and they needed to find them. I set up some tracks for them to follow out of the colony and into a forest, where they ran into a goblin party. I was giving them the opportunity to try and parley but the Fighter was impetuous and just attacked, and they ended up discovering a goblin camp, at which point they raised a militia, attacked the camp and burned it down, but the cattle were never there in the first place. We ended the session with them trying to figure out their next step, since the Wizard figured out that they could have handled that diplomatically and there was really no direct reason to attack the goblins if they had nothing to do with the cattle. As far as gameplay, the Fighter really liked the cleaving attack and battle cry abilities, using them in all three encounters I had set-up. I was planning to use Escalation Die, but it ended up not really mattering since the combats didn't even get to more than 3 rounds, even with 6 goblins at a time vs the 2 PCs. For the spell Flame Finger, and other spells that specify an (INT) attack roll, AC is still supposed to matter, right? A 15 INT Wizard attacking a -3 Goblin needs to roll a 12 or lower for his 1d8 Flame Finger damage to go off? This ended up not really mattering at all during the game as the Wizard made both of his INT rolls. I made them do rolls for things like WIS to detect tracks and notice ambushes, STR for intimidating NPCs, INT for being able to figure out some kind of rudimentary communication with a goblin captive, and CON to keep up and run after retreating goblins. That last one was a 'crit' of a natural 1 and I told the Fighter he ran supernaturally fast and ended up running ahead of the stragglers. One bit of prep I did was to use Wizardawn to dump a monster list (Labyrinth Lord's, to be precise, but I double-checked to make sure that the stats were the same) and convert all of the AC, attack and morale values ahead of time. We have another session scheduled for Wednesday, so that should be good. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 12:23 on Sep 29, 2014 |
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Sep 29, 2014 10:00
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Our group playing There's Always a Chance has now done 3 sessions and hit level 2. We've so far raided and burned a goblin camp, negotiated a treaty with some orcs, and cleaned out a mausoleum and its cultist housekeeper. I really like the simplicity of the system. The only house-rule I've thrown in so far is making the Wizard use INT rolls for throwing stones with his sling.
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Oct 3, 2014 20:29
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1. So I finally stumble across a way to calculate descending AC/THAC0 that makes it easy to understand: [d20 + to-hit bonus + AC >= 20] in order to land a hit, only to find that BECMI and its retroclones don't have the concept of a "to-hit bonus" or "Base Attack Bonus" yet and I have to backsolve it from the attack roll tables. 2. Saving throws - anyone know how Swords and Wizardry merged them into a single value? 3. A goon linked to his Planet Eris OD&D campaign and it has a set of pretty cool houserules such as fleshed out hirelings/henchmen, Magic-Users able to store extra level 1 spells in their staves and simplifying most rolls to d6's. 4. Are there any guidelines to encounter creation? In my latest TAAC session this morning I threw 7 zombies, then another 5 zombies, then 5 ghouls against a level 2 Fighter and a level 2 Wizard and they hardly broke a sweat. So far I've just been using the "No. Appearing" guidelines in the monster statblocks. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 15:53 on Oct 6, 2014 |
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Oct 6, 2014 15:51
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CountingWizard posted:I think he was asking more about why and how they decided to replace the multiple saving throw numbers with a single number; the save bonuses aren't the same. Yes, that's it - what was the basis for it. Averaging them all out or just taking the save vs spells category was what came to mind intuitively, but I haven't really dug deep enough into how the saves are/were assigned in the first place to know if that'd come out the same.
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Oct 7, 2014 07:14
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Thanks by the way for all the advice about encounters and THAC0/BAB. I recall stumbling upon a post once about designing megadungeons using flowcharts and fractals: there were something like 4-6 different flowchart templates (one node branching out to three, four nodes in sequence, a node with a side-node, etc.) and you just rolled to create the new section/set of rooms. Does that ring any bells?
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Oct 7, 2014 14:26
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I'm 6 sessions into the TAAC campaign now and we're even picking up a 3rd player. I tried my hand at making a dungeon - I used donjon to generate the rooms and the physical lay-out, the Basic set's instructions to determine room contents (roll d6 to check if it's empty, trapped, monsters, or special, roll again to see if treasure is present), and then D&D Basic Monster and Treasure Assortment Sets One-Three to generate the actual monster packs and treasures. It seems to work decently well. Is there anything I can refer to for random (empty) room descriptions and what to put in "Special" rooms?
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Oct 9, 2014 15:37
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Babylon Astronaut posted:The ruins of undermountain box set has a good table for empty rooms. You can probably get it on the cheap, the cards are good for stuff like this. It has a table for sounds, smells, and things. Make a list for each of sounds, smells, and things and roll. You'll get a pretty decent room description. When I do random generation, what makes my life easier is reverse justifying things. If my players think something is happening, or have a theory, surprise, they just did my work without knowing it. Thanks, I'll check that out. And yeah, the players coming up with their own suspicions is something I use a lot. The Fighter believes Orcs took the farmer's cattle ... so they did. The Wizard feels like all the undead-themed decor is the work of a Vampire ... so it is. Only a dragon would construct such an elaborate dungeon ... campaign-end-boss right there. The room description included moss and slime and they both ask me if it's flammable. Yup, it is, so they chuck their torches in and kill the Carrion Crawler without a fight.
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Oct 9, 2014 15:56
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Are there any guide(line)s on monster/encounter creation for BECMI/RC and its derivatives? Like, what the Hit Dice, AC, attack and damage of a monster of any given level should be, or ideally also including the encounter size of a party for any given level? While I know there's more than enough material out there to just pull encounters from with the proper refluffing, I was thinking if maybe someone had come up with something like "MM3 on an index card" or the 13th Age monster creation rules.
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Oct 20, 2014 19:25
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Scarlet Heroes is also part of that bundle and I highly recommend it. It's tailored for one-DM-one-player gaming, but if you remove the Fray Die rules (and also possibly change the damage rules back to normal) you end up with a perfectly straightforward OSR game that also has a 13th Age-style skill system and a shitton of (East Asian-themed) world creation tables.
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Nov 13, 2014 16:20
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Southern Heel posted:So I think I've finally amassed more than one other person who's interested in some old school D&D action. A while back I settled on S&W and I am looking at the three rulesets: Whitebox, Quick Start and Full Rulebook. Can someone who has more than a single game's DM'ing experience recommend one over the other for any particular reason? The quick start is just an abbreviated version of the White Box rules, as in it only goes up a few levels. The White Box is a clone of the original/0 Edition/three booklet D&D. It has much simpler rules, such as 1d6 +/- 1 for all weapons and far less emphasis on the value of attribute scores. The Complete Rules is a clone of B/X / Rules Compendium D&D, with much more fleshed out rules. You've got varying damage dice, more classes like the Druid, Monk and Paladin, and more high-level and out-of-dungeon options. I guess it depends on what you're looking for in your old-school gameplay. White Box is simpler and is much easier to pick up and play, whereas the Complete Rules are more representative of what (we think) D&D was.
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Nov 21, 2014 21:48
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CountingWizard posted:Paladins are the shittyest class in d&d though. They completely supplant fighters, are always annoying and restrictive to group with, and are just too superpowered. Now that I think about it, the idea that Paladins are better-Fighters but can only retain their better-than-Fighter-ness by being goody-two-shoes is probably where all the horror stories of DMs engineering all sorts of bullshit to make Paladins fall comes from. The game is practically telling the DM that he has to try or else this guy is going to really throw off the balance of the campaign. obeyasia posted:Deeds of Arms are great because it eschews the need for feats and the like. Its an all purpose ability. You call your shot, and if you roll well enough (30% of the time initially), it triggers and something cool happens. I love it because you have to be creative and use your brain to consider the monster and your surroundings for something cool to happen. That mechanic and spellcasting's "roll d20+INT+level to beat a DC of 10+[spell level * 2]" seem like really nice ideas all by themselves - the former to give the Fighter a lot more agency without having to implement a lot of rules (as you said, without needing to use Feats) and the latter as yet another alternative to spell slots (aside from spells-cost-HP or a spell point system) gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Nov 22, 2014 |
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Nov 22, 2014 21:30
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hectorgrey posted:Thing is, the Paladin isn't a bad class; it's just an easy class to play badly (though it does in part depend on the GM, as some GMs will make you fall for the pettiest of reasons). When you consider how high the stat requirements are to play one, and how they're required to be basically decent people (as opposed to murderhobos), the additional power they get in exchange seems about right.
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Nov 22, 2014 22:10
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The Basic Set says that whenever a character wants to do something that isn't covered by the rules, pick the most relevant attribute, roll a d20 and try to get equal to or less than the attribute score to succeed, and that the DM can assign a circumstantial plus or minus to the roll depending on how easy or difficult it should be. The Expert Set says the same, except you roll a 3d6, and then add (or subtract) d6s depending how easy or difficult it should be. That is, you have a 90.74% chance of rolling a 14 or lower with a 3d6, but that goes down to 55.63% with a 4d6, or a 22.15% chance with a 5d6.
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Nov 25, 2014 05:15
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Did anyone ever try to play B/X with the "Fighter gains an army at level 9+" rules? It should be possible to hack something up using either this passage from X37: "Fighter. The fighter will be 7th to 10th level, wandering the land (often going to or coming from a battle). The fighter usually has 2 retainers of 3rd to 6th level who have the same alignment as the leader." Or the creating an NPC party guidelines from page X53, or even from the Fighter's Followers percentile table in the 2E PHB, and then the way I was thinking of doing it would be that they'd be ablative armor: the player still only takes actions as a single character, but he gets extra attacks, HP, etc as though the other followers were the ones doing it (and computer rerolling can speed up this process), and taking damage means they get killed off first, and then you could also just come up with a cost to rehire/retrain fallen dudes. But I suppose the first question is if you even need something like this, or can the Fighter take on high-level monsters all by himself (and his party) assuming you were still just going into Dungeons and killing Dragons and not putting the players in a situation where you'd need to bust out the Mass Combat rules.
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Dec 18, 2014 09:08
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I already have an idea of how I'm going to do "domain management", my question was more towards "if I don't (try to) include the Fighter's additional men in combat, will that screw over the Fighter?" because I've heard it said more than once that the Fighter earning a posse at level 9 is supposed to make up for the Magic-User getting fifth-level spells. It makes sense, but at the same time the game doesn't really have specific guidelines on how the additional men are supposed to be taken into account during the traditional dungeoneering-combat segments. === drrockso20 posted:I don't remember hearing anything connecting the people who make ACKS with Gamersgate or anything of that sort, mind posting some sources to those accusations please, also in regards to mass combat, they are doing that in a supplement quote:Escapist writers Alex Macris (@archon) and Greg Tito, the pair of idiots responsible for that garbage article that gave voice to rape apologists, got some 'splaining to do.
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Dec 18, 2014 12:21
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This is a rough draft of some ideas I'd been bouncing around in my head for giving OSR Magic-Users some 4E-style at-will and encounter powers. It came about because as I was rolling up a random dungeon using the B/X tables, it occurred to me that a level 1 MU might find this place deeply unsatisfying because he'd just be hurling rocks after his one spell (not exactly a huge revelation, I know). As well, it steers the MU away from being able to handle all sorts of utility. The problem I'm seeing is that of scaling: if a spell targets AC, a Magic-User is going to be +2 attack behind a Fighter by Name level, and +6 attack behind a Fighter by level 20. Granted, 10% less chance to hit by the point where most campaigns peter out maybe isn't that bad a deal. Similarly, if a spell targets Saving Throws (vs spell), the chance of a spell going off just gets worse and worse as you get later into the game (around 40-50% chance to save by Name level) with no way for the MU to negate it (unless that's also another spell by itself). I was thinking of just fudging monster spell saves into a static "13 or better" at all levels. Also, if the distance or targeting definition in the spells seems rather vague, I did intentionally write it that way with a mind towards an abstract [Ranged > Melee Scrum < Ranged] behavior. Any thoughts / feedback would be appreciated.
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Dec 18, 2014 20:06
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DalaranJ posted:Is this in addition to dailies, or replacing dailies? FRINGE posted:One 2e option is to let the mage use [missile] of whatever as an alternate weapon (throwing daggers were popular with our groups) and let spells be memorized based on level vs time. I used 15 game minutes to memorize one spell level. That lets the player(s) have to prioritize what they save and what they rememorize, without ever completely running them dry. Theres always an excuse for a 30-60 min rest/bandage/eat break in-character. When they get the higher-level spells then those become much more of a limited commodity. FRINGE posted:If youre going to do this make sure their "never runs out" ability is worse than a thrown dagger, which they also have but have to actually carry as a limited resource. And I would definitley make it a to-hit roll. It will get tedious for you to roll saves every time the mage sneezes. DalaranJ posted:I don't know that I would make it worse than a dagger as long as it was still worse than the average 'at-will' move of every other class. Of course, by better than a thrown dagger I mean exactly like a thrown dagger except you don't have to stuff a pile of pointy things into your pack.
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Dec 19, 2014 07:29
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Again, thanks for the input - what I ended up doing was to create an "attack roll + INT adjustment" magic attack on a 1d4 as a baseline, then scaled up from there. A 1d6 needs the MU to get up close and personal, an AOE is encounter-only, and so on. More ideas to come, but maybe if I get players past the B book to begin with.CountingWizard posted:I'm firmly in the camp of believing that magic users shouldn't have at will spells. Combat isn't the solution to everything, and giving them unlimited combat ability changes the group dynamic. I'm just going to say that it depends on the kind of game you're playing. B/X D&D as written isn't really anything more than combat, except if the DM includes the reaction rules, but even then it's all up to the roll of the dice and a Fighter could be the one negotiating with the Ogres to prevent an encounter if his 3d6-down-the-line attributes blessed him with sufficient Charisma. I mean, I'm not disagreeing with you that giving casters at-wills is going to encourage players to play as "I attack, I hit, killed the monster, next", but that's specifically the kind of game I was looking to run in the first place.
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Dec 19, 2014 14:29
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Confirming that Scarlet Heroes owns. Modifying it for multiple players should be as simple as either shifting back to hit points and/or dropping the Fray Die system. EDIT: And a DM section has a truckton of "make up a campaign on the fly" tables and guidelines.
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Dec 20, 2014 05:00
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FRINGE posted:NOOooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo Hey the Germans pulled it off in 1940, they just had their pilots eat lots of carrots.
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Dec 20, 2014 21:18
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Bob Quixote posted:Alright then - forgive me if the post is long, I've just been thinking on things a lot and scouring the internet for interesting rules and wondered how these would work out together. I can come back later and edit it out if its redundant. These are all good ideas. 1. Yes, either dump the thief entirely and/or use a standard "roll under ability score" for his lockpicking and wall climbing attempts 2. Natural cleave is good, as is an AC bonus scaling with level. If you want them to do more I think just opening it up for the player with an ability check might work - roll under DEX to disarm, roll under STR to to pin/grapple, etc, but I don't know if you're going to further formalize what they can actually do specifically. 3. Scarlet Heroes does weapon damage almost exactly the same way: you can use any weapon you want, but the actual damage dice you use is still capped by your class. Keeps things simple. 4. The original Basic Companion set does two-weapon fighting the same way: all it does is let you roll damage twice and use the better result. I like it for its simplicity and maintaining the abstraction - a Fighter's extra attacks have nothing to do with how many weapons he's attacking with or how physically fast he's striking the enemy.
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Dec 22, 2014 01:14
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For Magic Users, what I did was to give them a "Basic Ranged Attack" that's d20 + INT modifier on the attack roll and deals 1d4 damage. They can flavor it however they like - one player still wanted to depict it as a sling that he just got better and better at, while another player played it off as a Magic Missile, but at bottom the point is that I wanted to give the Magic Users a way to attack after their 1 spell that didn't penalize them for having low DEX or low STR. Since you're basing damage dice on class, then the MU can say that the ranged attack is anything that's consistent with their character. Changing Vancian magic is trickier. I don't like it either, but muck around with it too much and you're basically playing armchair designer and/or are better off playing a different system entirely. Random thoughts: 1. Not having more than one spell sounds very feasible and I want to try that as well. 2. Payndz's There's Always A Chance has a rule where the MU gets an additional spell slot for every +1 on their INT modifier. So a level 1 MU with 18 INT would have 4 spell slots, and these "Auxiliary Spell Slots" can carry any level of spell. That gives the MU a lot more flexibility at low levels, but then you combine it with idea #1 to rein in the possibility of having 4 Fireballs as soon as the MU hits level 5. The other thing to note though is that this places a lot more importance on having a high INT stat, which could be a problem if you're going by classic random rolling for attributes and no way to increase attributes. 3. A more ambitious idea would be to look at the 13th Age Wizard for inspiration: all of their "slotted spells" are combat-related, but then they have a single generic Utility Spell that covers stuff like Feather Fall, Levitate, Water Breathing. On crits and combat maneuvers: my inspiration comes from Jimbozig's Strike!, which has a very simple combat mechanic: Roll a d6 1 means you miss and gain some sort of on-going disadvantage 2 means a flat miss 3 means you deal damage OR you get to inflict an effect 4-5 means you deal damage AND you get to inflict an effect 6 means you deal 2x damage AND you get to inflict an effect The effect is anything you and the DM agree to as being narratively appropriate, with the provision that if they try to use same effect twice, it's not as strong (or possibly won't work at all) Trying to translate this to a D20/D&D context lead me to the idea of: An attack roll to deal damage An ability check to inflict an effect You could also do something like attack rolls are always used for everything; damage OR effect if you just make the needed roll; damage AND effect if you exceed the needed roll by 4 or better. It might be slower to process since there's more math involved as far as getting the margin of success, but the advantage is that you won't have players with 18 in their main attribute inflicting effects left and right (although the "don't use the same effect twice" rule is supposed to already curb that, and it depends on the tone and narrative of your game). Finally, you can also do something like "If you crit an attack roll, you also get to inflict an effect. If you crit an ability check (a 1 on a roll-under d20), you also get to inflict damage.", but remember that crits only really happen 5% of the time so I don't know if it's worth adding on a bunch more edge cases.
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Dec 23, 2014 11:57
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Bob Quixote posted:Just read through your game and I really like the way you handled Wizards and the spell-lists between the different classes - actually there's just a ton of cool stuff in general in there. TAAC is really good as a retroclone that isn't just a rewrite of old D&D books and actually improves on the game in a lot of ways beyond one good Fantasy Heartbreaker idea that the author had.
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Dec 26, 2014 06:44
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Bob Quixote posted:The way that TAAC uses AC as a negative modifier makes me think of a blog post I'd seen somewhere where the writer had suggested a way of using the Pre-3.0 descending AC system as a modifier on your roll to hit and aiming for a target number of 20+. Yes! "Target 20" is a totally legit and awesome thing. [d20 + attack bonus + target's AC + other modifier] means you hit. It's mathematically the same as THAC0, except better because addition doesn't care what order you put the modifiers in. You still have to figure out your "attack bonus" manually from the hit matrix since D&D didn't use that concept until 3E, but otherwise yes it's cool. It only didn't catch on as much because it's a relatively new invention, but would definitely be the way I would do attack rolls in a retroclone if I wasn't using the hit matrix.
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Dec 27, 2014 04:37
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I introduced my childhood friends to Basic D&D today over a 4 hour session of romping through some dungeon I made up on the fly and I wanted to share some random thoughts: * It ended up being a lot more like Dungeon World / World of Dungeons than anything else (and is probably the universe telling to just loving run that instead already). I'd ask them what they wanted to do, I'd make up a ruling on the spot. We still abided by the attack roll vs AC system, but if the Fighter wanted to do a whirlwind or a cleave I'd do something like give him a slight penalty on the roll. The thief had a bow and wanted to shoot all sorts of arrows and we made up rules for that too, whether it was an Explosive Arrow to collapse a ceiling to deal AOE damage to some skeletons, or a Seeking Arrow to exchange damage for higher attack. * Vancian spellcasting went out the window almost immediately. My friends are long-time WoW and CRPG players, so the Magic User of the group had no trouble coming up with Cone of Cold or Blizzard or a basic Frostbolt to think of slinging at enemies. I used attack rolls to adjudicate these, using a d4 damage die for anything AOEish and a d6 for single-target attacks. * I gave everyone an array of [18, 16, 16, 12, 10, 8] to make it fair and avoid gimped characters, but it does not really play all that well with a roll-under ability check mechanic because you're going to pass drat near everything in your wheelhouse unless you use so many circumstantial modifiers that the original stat barely means anything anymore. Either I use a lower-power array (but that has carry-on effects to combat), or use randomly rolled stats (same thing) or use a [d20+modifier vs DC] system to open up the chance of failure a little bit more. * The Cleric was another pain-point. He wanted to buff people, but if he casts Bless for +1 attack and +1 AC to everyone and I don't maintain Vancian casting rules, then he can have it up every fight. If I try to track round durations to oblige him to recast it, that's just effectively taking away his turns from him. At the moment I recognized the issue I just told him "you can cast buffs, but you can't use the same ones every time" and he came up with "okay, I'm going to turn the Fighter's shield into a Holy Shield, +3 AC, but it's just for him, and it's just for 2 rounds" which worked well enough, but felt a little awkward on reflection. Him being a healbot was also not cool, and I feel like I want to do something like: In order for you to generate buffs and cast heals, you have to hit people with your weapon. * Target 20 worked really well, as did not actually thinking about the total modifiers, instead only adding them in one by one until you hit 20. If a player rolls a 4, then don't bother looking up their attack bonus or the target's AC anymore. If the player rolls an 18, same thing. Just look outside the roll to "chase after the 20" if you got something like a 13. * Unless you're running ~that~ kind of game, I would recommend giving everyone HP equal to [CON score + hit die + CON modifier]. There was a big set-piece battle right at the end with 6 skeleton warriors and a Necromancer and it came down to the two Fighters just tanking everything down because d6 damage dice on mobs will still drop 8/8 HP Clerics, 8/8 HP Thieves and 6/6 HP Magic-Users way too quickly. There was no real sense of tension if a single hit could drop you either way. * TAAC's 3 suggested methods for improving B/X D&D's attack rolls in combat is sorely needed. On top of losing the interest of players halfway through the final setpiece because they were all down/knocked out, there was a lot of whiffing going on. * All that said, everyone had a great time and it really drove home the point that with a good group, you barely even need rules and can paper over drat near anything. Also, that certain flavors of TRPGing are not very serious at all and that's all right. Maybe a third or half the time was spent in pop culture references and in-jokes and laughing at D&D tropes.
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Dec 27, 2014 21:27
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OtspIII posted:Yeah, I'd also be super interested in an alternate way to handle healing/clerics. I have a pdf here called "D&D: Greatest Hits" that I don't know where I got it from anymore, but the Cleric's ability there is "Select an ally. On your next turn, they gain 1d6 + level HP, unless spoiled by you taking damage" and it doesn't consume their action for the turn. Higher levels will prevent 'spoilage' unless the Cleric takes more than 5 + level damage, and even later the Cleric will get to select two targets to heal. TheSpookyDanger posted:I'm increasingly of the opinion that the cleric should be eliminated alongside the thief, but you could do something interesting with this idea. Have the cleric declare an enemy as anathema. Killing/sufficiently damaging this enemy recharges casts. You could even tie HD of thing killed being a threshold for recharging higher level miracles. Maybe you could do something similar with the MU, but reflavor it to some kind of arcane drain. One could take this to its logical extreme and have everyone play Fighters on the back-end. d12 hit dice and Fighter attack progression, and players are just picking a theme for their attacks, a choice between melee and ranged and just roleplaying why Bob's d6 ranged attack is actually a Magic Missile while Tom's d6 ranged attack is a Holy Smite. And maybe one of them has Chain Mail and therefore 2 worse AC because they want to play as a Cleric. I mean, it only makes sense that in a game of going through dungeons and killing dragons, the feature of "being really good at fighting" should really be something that all classes should have.
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Dec 28, 2014 16:44
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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