Author: Joshua Macy

You want to know what manner of man is Joshua, What manner of man, you want to know.... A man of the moment is Joshua, and when the moment leads, there do I go! I live to love, I love to live!
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More Thoughts on RuneQuest

I’m reconsidering part of the rule I proposed for special effects like impale in RuneQuest. The problem with any die showing a 0 is an impale as long as it’s a success is that it skews the chances of impaling at low skills quite a bit. With 20% skill, half your successful hits are impaling. Not what I’d really like to see.

Instead, I’m thinking of making it 0 or 5 showing on the 1’s die. This restores it to about 20% chance regardless of the skill. I think this works out to where rounding would happen with the original RQ: skill 15%, say, you have 3 chances out of 15 (05, 10, 15), while at 19 it’s still 3 but now out of 19, not becoming 4 out of 20 until you hit 20.

In some ways this is even easier to spot: multiples of 5 are special. Hard to imagine even my math phobic players objecting to that.

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Simplifying Spell Resistance in RuneQuest 2e

As part two of “The Macy Conventions”, I want to look at Spell Resistance.

Spell resistance is another thing that’s needlessly complicated in RuneQuest 2e, or at least expressed in a needlessly complicated way. The rule is that to cast a spell on a resisting target, you need to roll 50%, plus 5% for every point your POW is higher than theirs, -5% for every point lower. 96-00 always fails. They even gave you a handy chart to cross index the POWs and see what you need to roll

Chart showing the percentile you would need to roll for each POW between 1 and 21 against POW 1 to 21.

That strikes me as an ugly way to achieve this result. My house rule is:

Spell Resistance

  1. Roll d20 and add (Your POW – 10)
  2. If result exceeds (not equals) target’s POW, spell succeeds
  3. If result is less than or equal to target’s POW, spell fails
  4. A 1 always fails.

That’s mathematically identical, but seems to me much easier at the table. Most people are very fast at subtracting 10 from a number, even when it results in a negative number, compared to subtracting arbitrary numbers between 1 and 21 and then adding 50.

POW Gain Rolls

If you qualify for a POW gain roll after an adventure (cast a spell that could fail other than the auto fail on a 1 in a stressful situation during an adventure), roll strictly higher than your current POW on a d20 and you can increase your POW according to the regular rule (10% chance of +3 POW, 30% chance of +2, otherwise +1).

This is mathematically equivalent to the original subtract POW from racial max, multiply by 5 and roll less than the result on %.

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The Macy Conventions: A RuneQuest house rule

As is my wont, I’ve been noodling on some older games that have come up in conversation recently, and in particular RuneQuest 2e. I ran a RuneQuest campaign, back in the day, and I’m pretty sure we started with 1st edition, and later switched to 2e (or maybe I just did a different campaign of 2e… wouldn’t be the first time my memory of those long ago events was a little blurry). There were a lot of things I liked about RQ, and later the whole BRP line, particularly Call of Cthulhu, and its percentile dice system was one of the easiest things ever for players to grok. Your skill at driving was 32%, cool, roll under 32 on the percentile dice and you’re golden. Now, what exactly it meant to fail that roll when it was something as mundane as driving was a matter of interpretation and sometimes heated debate, but the basic principle couldn’t be simpler.

But I was never quite happy with the way things like criticals and fumbles were worked into the roll, or in RuneQuest things like impaling with your pointy weapon. The basic rule, with many variations on the exact numbers, was always something like compute 5% of your skill, if you roll that or less you’ve scored a critical hit. For instance if your skill was 100, then 01-05 was a crit; if your skill was 50, then only 01-02 (or maybe 03 depending on rounding). An impale would be similarly 01-20 with skill 100, while proportionally less the lower your skill. Fumbles were the reverse, though explained rather confusingly as starting at 5% (96-00) for skills less than or equal to 20 and being reduced by 1% for every full 20% in your skill (97-00 for skill 40, 98-00 for skill 60, etc.) This meant that unless you were great at mental arithmetic, you had to write down your critical, impale, and fumble range for each and every skill on your character sheet, updating it whenever the skill improved. And if you reached the point with skills at 100+ where you could split your skill into two actions with any division you liked as long as both were at least 50, recalculating with what you chose at the moment (or sticking to a split that you precalculated). Bleh, and double-bleh.

So, I’ve come up with a dice-rolling method for RuneQuest, BRP, and really any other percentile system that I really quite like. As far as I know this is original, though my memory being what it is and with all the time people have spent fiddling with things like this some pieces of it may have been published elsewhere and I’ve just forgotten running across it. As far as I can tell glancing through my Chaosium books, though, none of them have used this, sticking to variations on what I’ve laid out above. I think RoleMaster had a special convention for 66, maybe for all doubles, but I’m hazy on the details. Here it is, though, for your entertainment, with a tip of the hat to the famed Perrin Conventions that started the whole RuneQuest thing, the Macy Conventions:

The basic idea is to read the percentile roll cleverly, to simulate (more or less) the odds that calculating it the old way would have given you, and incidentally incorporating the 1d20 Hit Location roll into the same roll through more shenanigans in how you read off the result. Moreover, we want the whole thing be so simple and easy to remember that you wouldn’t have to keep looking it up once you understood it. Basically all doubles are special, either a crit or or fumble based on whether the roll qualifies as a hit or miss.

Special Results

  • Critical Hit: Any doubles (11, 22, etc.) that would normally hit
  • Fumble: Any doubles that would normally miss
  • Special Effect (Impale/Slash/Crush): Any roll that would normally hit with a 0 in either digit
  • Always Hit: 05 or less
  • Always Miss: 96 or higher

Hit Locations

Read the ones digit of your roll:

  • If tens digit is even: Use ones digit as location (0 = 10)
  • If tens digit is odd: Add 10 to ones digit

For reference the following is the hit location table from RQ 2. I haven’t really given much thought yet to whether there’s a way to simplify it to reduce the need to look it up, but the one look-up doesn’t strike me as that burdensome compared to the original. And of course if anybody finds the process of checking the tens digit this way a pain, they can just roll a separate d20. You probably should roll the separate d20 when you crit anyway, so crits don’t cluster in a couple locations. But for Ernalda’s sake, roll it at the same time as you roll your damage!

Humanoid Hit Location Table

D20AreaDescription
01-04Right LegRight leg from hip joint to foot
05-08Left LegLeft leg from hip joint to foot
09-11AbdomenHip joint to just under the floating ribs
12ChestFloating ribs to neck and shoulders
13-15Right ArmEntire right arm
16-18Left ArmEntire left arm
19-20HeadNeck and head

Example: if you hit with a 27, that’s location 7, so left leg; if you hit with a 37 that would be 17, so left arm.

Examples

  • You have a skill of 39.
    • You roll 33! It’s a crit, and strikes the right arm (13)!
    • You roll a 55! It’s a fumble, roll on the fumble table.
    • You roll a 19! It’s a hit.
    • You roll a 20! It’s a hit to the abdomen (10), and the attack impales/crushes/slashes depending on your weapon!
    • You roll an 07! It’s a hit to the left leg (7), and again the attack impales/crushes/slashes.
    • You roll a 70! It’s a miss.
  • You have a skill of 65.
    • You roll a 34, it’s a hit to the right arm (14)!
    • You roll a 44, it’s a critical hit to the right leg (4)!
    • You roll a 66, it’s a fumble!
    • You roll a 100, it’s a fumble!
    • You roll a 01, it’s an impaling/slashing/crushing hit to the right leg!

Stuck Weapons

Addendum: I had forgotten that a successful impale left the weapon stuck in the target unless you rolled again immediately looking for double the chance of an impale, i.e. if you had 4% chance of impale, you had 8% chance of freeing the weapon that same turn. On subsequent turns you just had to roll an ordinary hit. So:

Freeing stuck weapon: roll again, looking for a hit with either 0s or 1s on either die.

Later turns it’s still just looking for an ordinary successful hit. Automatically successful after 5 turns trying, just as in the original rules.

A Look at the Odds

So, how close is this method to the original? The answer is pretty close. Crits are about twice as common, but ranging from 0% if your skill is <11 to 9% if your skill is 99+. For instance if your have skill 25 you have 2 chances in 100 of scoring a crit (11 and 22 instead of just on an 01); if you have skill 99 you have 9 chances in 100 (11, 22, 33, 44, 55, 66, 77, 88, 99), while a 91 score it would be only 8. Fumbles are the same but in reverse, just being more common at lower skills and less common at higher ones. Double sounds like a lot, but twice a small number is still pretty small, and at least some later editions of RQ switched to 10% of the skill anyway, to make the calculation easier and the combat more spicy.

Chance of impalement (or crushing/slashing if you use that option) is a bit closer to the original. Once you get past 10% skill, you have 9 chances to impale (01-09) + 1 chance for every 10% more skill. So at 50% skill that would be 14% (01-09, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50) instead of the original 10%, while at 100% it would be 18% instead of 20%. My experience is that differences that small are very hard for the players to even perceive, though your mileage may vary, and it’s not like the original was arrived at by any rigorous examination of the odds in real combat.

The always hit/always miss odds are straight from the original, while the hit locations are nearly identical: there are exactly 10 digits on the ones die, and exactly half of the the digits on the tens die represent adding 10 to get the upper half of the d20. The nearly part comes from the fact that since 00 is always a miss, you only get 4 out of 100 ways of rolling a 10 (20, 40, 60, 80). All the others are spot-on. There’s also the slightly odd fact that the always hit numbers are always going to be blows to the legs, but I’m not sure I’m that worried about it; if I were I could say that if you roll an automatic hit then you roll a d20 for hit location instead of just reading it off the dice. Is the one special case better or worse than people’s legs being slightly more vulnerable than the rest of them?

Characteristic Checks

Don’t multiply by 5 and roll under the stat, just roll a d20 directly against the stat. Unless you plan on using the crits and fumbles rules on the stat checks, it’s mathematically identical.

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Let’s Make a Deal!

A System-Neutral Trading Mini-game

So here’s a reworking/system neutralization of the trading system from my Zap! game.

Note, has not been play-tested at all in its current form. To use it you have to fill in some details from your particular system and setting, like what 1 point of cost/profit actually amounts to, how big a cargo is a small or large cargo. But by design it’s easily scaled so you can use the same basic procedure whether you’re trading in back-packs full of goods for copper, wagons full of goods for silver, or shiploads of goods for gold.

Even though the mechanics are in terms of completely generic trade goods, the intent is to make up flavor details on the fly about what the cargo actually is, like otter pelts, bags of salt, sets of fertility figurines of the goddess Whut, or whatever.

Simple Trading Mini-Game

Core Mechanics

  • Characters use cargo space to transport goods between locations
  • Each cargo space can hold either one large shipment or two small shipments
  • Trading requires finding goods at one location and selling them at another

Location Ratings

Each location has a Wealth Rating from 4-12:

  • Higher ratings mean more money to spend but pickier buyers
  • Even ratings use matching dice (e.g., 2d4 for rating 4)
  • Odd ratings use mixed dice (e.g., 1d4 + 1d6 for rating 5)
  • Take the higher roll of the two dice

Goods and Cargo

  • Goods have a Value Rating from 4-12 using the same dice system
  • Higher-rated goods are easier to sell but harder to acquire
  • Lower-rated goods are easier to find but harder to sell at wealthy locations
  • Small shipments: Roll trading skill at -2 when buying, Value Rating is normal when selling
  • Large shipments: Roll trading skill normally and get +2 to Value Rating when selling

Trading Process

Buying:

  1. Choose what type of goods to look for (set Value Rating) and shipment size
  2. Roll your trading skill (with -2 for small shipments) vs. the good’s Value Rating
  3. If you succeed, goods are available at the price shown by the lower of the two Value Rating dice
  4. If you fail or don’t like the price, must wait 3 actions before trying again

Selling:

  1. Roll the good’s Value Rating (+2 for large shipments) vs. location’s Wealth Rating
  2. If successful, buyers offer the amount shown on the Wealth Rating dice
  3. Profit/loss is the difference between selling and buying price
  4. Must sell at a different location than where you bought
  5. If you fail or don’t like the offer, must wait 3 actions before trying again
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The Mistakes of Greyhawk

The other day I said offhandedly in the Wandering DM’s discord that I’m halfway inclined to categorize Greyhawk, the first supplement to original Dungeons & Dragons, as a series of mistakes that we’re still paying for. The more I think about it, the more I want to make that case.

Mistake 1: Thieves

The Thief was the first step on the slippery slope of a class for everything, and everything needs a class. Before the Thief, if somebody wanted to perform an action like attempt to pick a pocket or disarm a trap, or even hide in shadows, the Referee would just have to adjudicate it based on assessing the situation and maybe considering things like Dex or armor worn, to taste. After the Thief not only was there a specific mechanic for it, but the Thief’s chances were so low (<50% for almost everything except climbing until about 7th level) that clearly nobody but a Thief should be allowed to attempt it at all. Much ink has been spilled over the years since trying to rationalize or make it workable (e.g. making Thieves skills nigh supernatural, not just hiding but hiding with nothing but a shadow to conceal you). All of that, though, is clearly a band-aid on something that wasn’t originally a wound.

Mistake 2: ATTRIBUTE Inflation

The little brown books (LBB) of original D&D had the Referee (!) rolling up the attributes, called Abilities, for the characters, and then little else there were explicit rules for. The following is pretty much it.

Bonuses and Penalties to Advancement due to Abilities:
(Low score is 3–8; Average is 9–12; High is 13–18)
Prime requisite 15 or more: Add 10% to earned experience
Prime requisite 13 or 14: Add 5% to earned experience
Prime requisite of 9–12: Average, no bonus or penalty
Prime requisite 8 or 7: Minus 10% from earned experience
Prime requisite 6 or less: Minus 20% from earned experience
Constitution 15 or more: Add +1 to each hit die
Constitution 13 or 14: Will withstand adversity
Constitution of 9–12: 60% to 90% chance of survival
Constitution 8 or 7: 40% to 50% chance of survival
Constitution 6 or less: Minus 1 from each hit die*
Dexterity above 12: Fire any missile at +1
Dexterity under 9: Fire any missile at –1

minimum score of 1 on any die

There was guidance in the description of what the abilities mean that hinted ways the Referees might use them, e.g. “Dexterity applies to both manual speed and conjuration. It will indicate the character’s missile ability and speed with actions such as firing first, getting off a spell, etc.” but no formal procedures. There was also some confusing stuff about using your abilities to raise your prime requisite, but it mostly made little difference in play.

So when Greyhawk adds a bunch more explicit rules around abilities, that seems like a welcome change. Finally, this is what the scores in abilities were for! Unfortunately, the way this was done was a mistake and led directly to the current hell of Attribute Inflation where in D&D 5e “Dex-based builds” should be aiming for a 20 in Dex. Where in the LBB, having an 18 Str is no better or worse than a 12 Str unless the Referee deems it important in the situation, starting in Greyhawk a 1st level fighter with 18 STR is better at attacking than a 6th level fighter with 12 STR (same chance to hit, but on average double the damage)… and that’s before the wackiness of the “percentile strength” that gets tacked on once you roll an 18 in STR. The scale is wrong when a lucky roll (or persistence in rolling up new characters) counts for more than months of advancement in play.

If anything Magic-users have it worse with the new intelligence rules. Before Greyhawk a high Int wizard was benefited primarily by leveling up ever-so-slightly faster than an average Int wizard. According to Greyhawk, though, average Int wizards have only a 50-50 shot at knowing any given spell, have a strict maximum on how many spells of a given level they can ever know, and are cut off from learning the highest level spells completely. The exact details don’t matter, though, as much as the fact that now for the first time there’s really an optimal “build” for a character class, and it really matters. You can see this play out in subsequent editions, starting with AD&D where they abandon 3d6 in order in favor of various methods of skewing the numbers towards higher averages (e.g. 4d6 drop lowest, roll 3d6 12 times and take the best 6, etc.) until in 5e you get here, here are your numbers, arrange them.

Mistake 3: Hit Point Inflation

Greyhawk introduced the variable-sized hit die by class “expressly aimed at raising fighters and lowering magic-users with regard to hit points which can be sustained.” Fighters would now get d8, while Magic-users were lowered to d4 (and Thieves came in at d4). Moreover if you used this system all monsters would get d8 hit dice. Since not all weapons were adjusted, the effect was either to draw out combats or funnel everybody into using the weapons that kept parity with the monsters. I’m not sure what problem this was solving (was there anybody who thought too many MUs were surviving to 2nd level?), I think the trend towards both monsters and PCs (except wizards) being ever larger bags of HP was clearly set in motion.

Mistake 4: XP Deflation

Maybe not one of Greyhawk’s biggest sins, but since we’re going through the pages in order… Declaring the original 100 XP per HD ridiculous, Greyhawk adds a lookup table of XP awards that slash them to about a 1/5 to 1/3. Again I’m not sure what problem this solves, although maybe if you’re running games every day of the week anything to slow leveling down is a plus. In theory this tilts the playing field farther towards getting most of your XP from gold, but I believe in practice it just led to more calls for getting XP for other things, or per session and eventually to the current fad of ditching XP completely and leveling up when the GM or module feels it’s appropriate.

MISTAKE 5: THE SINGLE BEST WEAPON

Greyhawk added a number of things that changed how weapons worked in the “Alternative Combat System” (the d20 system that everybody, including Gary, uses). First is variable damage dice per weapon, which I admit I kind of like, but as implemented means that really the only weapons that stay on par with Monster HP are the ones that fighters use. The weapons that do more damage than a 1 handed sword are all flagged as requiring so much space on either side of the wielder that they require the wielder to stand alone in the front line. How Gary reconciled his love of historical polearms with the new requirement that polearm users can never actually form ranks, requiring a minimum of 6′ on either side, I don’t really know. My suspicion is that he only intermittently enforced that rule, if at all. The next widely ignored bit was to-hit bonuses per weapon by AC and different weapon damage against larger-than-man-sized creatures. The interaction between the tables is messy, but the net effect is once again sword is the all-purpose weapon (military pick being better to-hit against the heaviest armor but losing in damage, particularly when it comes to large creatures).

Before Greyhawk all characters would use whatever weapon they liked best (or was most magical) within class restrictions. After Greyhawk, regardless of the specifics, most of which weren’t carried over past AD&D, there was seldom any better weapon than a sword so everybody who can uses that. Heck, one of the most common restriction to relax on Clerics is the one forbidding them from using swords. There have been various attempts, particularly in house rules, to introduce some easier to work with reasons for favoring this or that alternative weapons, such as differentiating between piercing, crushing and slicing damage and making those interact with various monster damage resistances or armor types but frankly they’re all kind of messy. Given the abstract nature of D&D’s combat and Hit Point system the addition of various distinctions between weapons and how they interact with what kind of target seems like yet another mistake. It’s a lot of work to add very little to the decision making process of combat.

Mistake 6: Armor Class Inflation

Or perhaps that’s Deflation, given the descending armor class. For the first time Greyhawk contemplates how magic armor and shields can stack to give you AC even better than plate armor and shield, introducing the dread negative AC, all the way out to AC -8! No, just no. Even when ascending AC became a thing, there were still ACs that went up to 30. 5e eventually tried to rein this in with the concept of “bounded accuracy” but it’s not actually clear they succeeded.

Mistake 7: Monster Attack Inflation

Greyhawk greatly complicated the monsters attacks with a chart of how many attacks and what damage each monster rolled (unfortunately expressed as a range like 2-8 instead of a set of dice to roll, requiring the Ref to back into the roll), most of them becoming very much more dangerous. In the LBB only a handful of the most dangerous monsters like Giants or Hydras ever had more than one attack or did more than 1d6 damage, now more than half the creatures do multiple attacks, more than 1d8 damage, or both. This was the beginning of needing a monster stat block to express what a monster can do, and the beginning of the headaches for the Referee to keep track of all that and use it, culminating in things like The Monsters Know What They’re Doing. Keith Ammann seems like a great guy, and he writes entertainingly, but something has gone off the rails if this kind of thing is really a helpful resource.

MISTAKE 8: Spell Inflation

Greyhawk introduced several of D&D’s most iconic spells like Magic Missile, Web, Magic Mouth, and Explosive Runes. It also introduced entirely new, and imo unnecessary, spell levels: a whole three new levels of MU spells including such game breakers as Reverse Gravity, Mass Charm, Time Stop, and Wish. Clerics get another two whole levels, because Raise the Dead just isn’t miraculous enough. Several of these seem to just exist to excuse Refs putting such effects in the dungeons. Others are, OK, but do you really have 18th level MUs who are going to cast them? What’s going on with your campaign?

On the whole these are relatively harmless, except maybe really blowing out the end-game expectations of what PCs are capable of… and to extent you accept those as goals really putting the emphasis on choosing races and playing characters with scores that can reach those lofty levels. Maybe it upped the temptation to go full Monty Hall just so your players could get there, but the drive to level up was always pretty much the core motivation of the game.

Mistake 9: Infra-Vision

Update: I can’t believe I missed this first time around, but I was just discussing how I removed infra-vision from demi-humans in my games, and I looked it up and found that infra-vision was another thing added in Greyhawk. In the LBB only monsters have infra-vision, and they actually lose it if they become part of a PC party! Not having infra-vision, even for monstrous humanoids like goblins and orcs makes it closer to the way things worked in the Hobbit, reduces the perceived need to have all demi-human parties so as not to worry about light sources, and to makes stealth a more viable option in the dungeon. If the goblin and orcs in the dungeon need light sources it’s no longer the case that the party using a light source will instantly alert all the monsters.

The Rest of the Book

Most of the rest is new treasure, new monsters including several of the most iconic D&D monsters such as Gelatinous Cubes, Umber Hulks, Rust Monsters and Stirges, new traps and some errata. Except maybe the monsters that are really more of a trap and the wild proliferation of cursed items there’s nothing much that stands out as clearly a mistake or a step along a perilous path.

The Prosecution Sums Up

Over all, the biggest effect of Greyhawk taken in toto is to greatly enhance the importance of ability scores, buff fighters, and nerf everyone else, particularly Magic Users. Making MU’s twice as fragile while half as effective at fighting really contributed to the both their perception as not being fun to play (unless you could start at higher levels) and the whole 15-minute workday phenomenon that even 5e is still struggling to counteract. In retrospect I see Greyhawk as being in some ways a product of the so-called “death spiral of improvements” that besets many fields of endeavor as new works cater more and more to jaded experts, lessening if not ruining much of their initial charm and approachability for novices. When you’re running a campaign for many players, nearly every day of the week, lots of new high-end toys for them to play with and more procedures that offer minor variation even if somewhat more baroque and cumbersome can seem especially attractive, while making things increasingly frustrating and difficult for low-level characters or reducing the variety of viable characters seems like a minor price to pay. At this point in an established campaign, you might hardly have anybody playing 1st through 3rd level characters as even when characters die you’re letting them start at a higher level or inherit the funds and equipment of the original character or they’re catching up in a few session from their split of loot in higher level adventures.

So what would I actually use from Greyhawk? Honestly I’m not sure. If I were to run a specifically OD&D game, and not some kind of B/X hybrid, I probably would pull in most of the new spells but not the new spell levels, all of the monsters and treasure. Beyond that I’m really not sure any of it is worth it. There’s a strong temptation to do something explicit for high or low ability scores and to provide some incentives to use different weapons, but I think I would really try to rely more on just applying more Referee’s discretion to work things out.

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Break! Kickstarter is live!

Apparently it’s been in the works for 10 years now. Funny, it feels like only seven.

BREAK!

I’ve lost touch with Reynaldo since the great G+ diaspora, so I wasn’t really sure if this was still going to be a thing. I’m pretty pleased that it is, though I have no idea if I’m going to find anybody to play it with. I’m not sure anyone in my home group is that into the anime and JRPG influences that are its inspiration. Maybe if I pitched it as Studio Ghibli meets D&D…

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ReTurning to Thieves

So, now that we have our Universal Mechanic for all older D&D editions, where does that leave us regarding Thieves? I’ve written before on how I felt the RAW versions of their skills are nearly useless, and my house-rule solution to that, but at the time I was trying to stick to the bonus chart and a d20 resolution. But if we were to go rogue, ahem ahem, we could completely supplant that with our lovely Turning mechanic.

Compare the Thief’s level with the level of the dungeon/degree of difficulty and roll 2d6 modified by DEX, INT, or CHA modifiers depending on what skullduggery the Thief is up to. We can use the 1/2 HD Skeleton row for mundane situations such as trying pick a pocket of some schmo in the town square, or pick the lock on an ordinary building in town. For opposed checks, such as bamboozling an ordinary shop-keeper, we can include any WIS or INT modifier they might have against the target number. E.g. a 2d level Thief (Footpad) would ordinarily automatically succeed in passing a dud coin against a 0-level merchant, but if the merchant had a Wisdom bonus of +2 then the Thief would actually have to roll a 7 or better… though he might have his own attribute mods to add in.

I like this pretty well.

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To everything turn, turn, turn

The universal mechanic that was hiding in D&D all along!

There are a lot of ways that DMs have turned to over the years since the D&D white box in order to adjudicate various actions players want to take that aren’t covered explicitly in the rules. While there are definitely defenders who claim part of the charm of old editions is that every way of adjudicating something in the game required its own idiosyncratic sub-system, over the years a lot of DMs have spent a lot of time and energy trying to come up with a universal mechanic, if not to replace any of the “core” mechanics at least to fall back on when there isn’t a clearly defined procedure in the rules.

One of the commonest stabs at this universal mechanic is “ability checks”, usually against the characters’ attributes. Vague Countries has a nice discussion here.

The classic method, enshrined in Tom Moldvay’s Basic D&D (p. B60) is just to roll d20 below an attribute the DM picks. On the one hand, it’s nice and simple, on the other it really makes attributes much more important that they are in OD&D or in other parts of the rules; instead of a 16 granting a mere +10% on a d20 roll it suddenly becomes an 80% chance of success. Another method, apparently used a lot by Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz is roll 3, 4, or 5d6 under an attribute, depending on how hard the task is. Dan “Delta” Collins has an analysis of the odds of the various rolls here.

But aside from the various complaints about the odds and the inflation of importance of attributes, generally speaking I find attribute checks not particularly satisfactory. It strikes me as a problem that most of them neither scale well against harder and easier tasks nor take into account level, which is the overall scale of competence that D&D is built on.

Recently, though, I’ve realized that there has been an almost perfect universal mechanic hidden in plain sight in D&D ever since the white box: I’m talking about the Clerical Turning mechanic!

Here’s how it was presented in the white box, rolling 2d6 on the following table:

Typical of Gary’s approach to rules, it presents as a table something that’s actually a simple formula, but that’s by no means obvious shorn of the numbers. The columns are actually the cleric’s level, 1-8, and the rows are the monster’s hit dice, 1/2 through 7. So really what this is presenting is that clerics have a Target Number of 7 against undead 1 hit die less than them, and it gets 2 points harder for each additional hit die the undead has, and 2 points easier for each hit die less. If the number is below 7 turning is automatic, and if it’s literally impossible to fail the undead is destroyed; similarly if it’s impossible for the cleric to succeed, the result is No Effect. Building in the automatic success, critical success, and automatic failure in this way is really sweet, and pegging the target below which you don’t even need to roll to better than 50% chance of succeeding really speeds up play, in my experience.

HD12345678
Skeleton1/27531-1-3-5-7
Zombie197531-1-3-5
Ghoul21197531-1-3
Wight3131197531-1
Wraith415131197531
Mummy5171513119753
Spectre61917151311975
Vampire721191715131197
Turning Table as Target Numbers

So here’s the thing: here we have a method of comparing a character’s level with a target difficulty. For undead it’s just their Hit Dice, but you could imagine it being the dungeon level a hazard or lock is found on, or any sort of ad-hoc decision by the DM. What’s more, the 2d6 scale fits in nicely with attribute bonuses ranging from -3 to +3 as per Moldvay and its descendants. +/-1 is not quite as good/bad as being 1 level higher, +/-2 is equivalent to a level, and +/-3 is a bit better than being a level higher/lower. That seems pretty nice to me.

But wait, there’s more! How much does each bonus improve your chances of hitting the Target Number? Here’s a quick chart:

TotalExactAt least+1improvement+2improvement+3improvement
23%100%100%0%100%0%100%0%
36%97%100%3%100%3%100%3%
48%92%97%6%100%8%100%8%
511%83%92%8%97%14%100%17%
614%72%83%11%92%19%97%25%
717%58%72%14%83%25%92%33%
814%42%58%17%72%31%83%42%
911%28%42%14%58%31%72%44%
108%17%28%11%42%25%58%42%
116%8%17%8%28%19%42%33%
123%3%8%6%17%14%28%25%
Chance of rolling at least N on 2d6, rounded nearest

The improvement in probability of success isn’t uniform, but you can see that the biggest differences fall right at the fat part of the distribution. It’s a bigger difference on your average roll than on the extremes, not surprisingly, and none of them are over 50%, so not overwhelming. Even nicer is that at best, a +1 is adding about 1/6 to your chances, a +2 is adding about 2/6, and a +3 is adding not quite 3/6. It could hardly be easier to remember or reason about.

To me this is actually pretty amazing: Roll 2d6 vs Target 9 against things that are even-on with the character in terms of level/hit dice, adding in any attribute modifiers, and Bob’s your uncle! If I were coming up with a mechanic de novo, I might be inclined to make even-on a target 7 but I can see an argument that if you have no particular reason to be good at a task it’s realistic that it’s more likely than not you’ll fail. I’m tempted to use Target 7 anyway as just being a little easier to remember, and being a bit more like the way combat works, with Level 1/HD 1 attackers being about 50-50 to hit unarmored foes, but I’m not sure whether I like Clerics vs. Undead then being a special case…

So there you have it, my new go-to Universal Mechanic for all older editions of D&D and their kin.

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I wrestle With Myself

You know the bit in The Night of the Hunter where Robert Mitchum’s sinister itinerant preacher tells the “the story of right hand, left hand” using his hands tattooed with LOVE and HATE to illustrate man’s eternal struggle between the impulse of good and evil, love or hate winning the wrestling match between the two hands? If you don’t you should probably go watch The Night of the Hunter instead of spending your time reading my ramblings.

When it comes to D&D, I’ve got that going on, except my knuckles are labeled PLAIN and GONZO. On the one hand, I’m intensely attracted to fantasy settings with weird SF elements layered in or behind the pseudo-medieval trappings, as in the original little brown books D&D where Robots, Golems, and Androids were listed right along with Titans, Cyclopes, and the iconic Gelatinous Cube. For that matter, one of the first official dungeons for D&D, The Temple of the Frog, had a completely SF back-story of the original temple of a cult of crazy killer-frog breeders being taken over by extra-dimensional traveler with a battle suit, a mobile medical kit and “interstellar radio” who was part of a failed expedition sent to protect this world from other extradimensional incursions! It was released in 1975 as part of Blackmoor, the second supplement to D&D, five years before the famous Expedition to the Barrier Peaks module in which the adventurers explore a crashed space-ship. You could say that Science Fantasy is baked into D&D from the outset. Or perhaps you could say that D&D dates back to a time when the genres of Science Fiction and Fantasy were not so clearly separated as they are now.

On the other hand, I also really dig the idea of running D&D in a completely folkloric setting, inspired by The Hobbit, The King of Elfland’s Daughter, The Prydain Chronicles, the Book of Weird, and the like. Not an authentic medieval world (though that would be interesting and most players would find it genuinely weird), but more like a world as medieval folks imagined it to be, where superstitions are mostly true and “Up the airy mountain, Down the rushy glen, We daren’t go a-hunting. For fear of little men.”1

Whenever I am running or creating adventures and locales for one kind of setting, I find myself overflowing with ideas for the other kind. If I’m running a Plain campaign where the players are slowly exploring the first few leagues around their home base and gradually working their way further into the ancient forest where the Elves dwell, I’ll have this urge to put in a portal to Barsoom. If I’m running a Gonzo, anything goes, Sci-Fantasy campaign based on a psychedelic version of Oz (hello, Ultra-Violet Grasslands) I’ll find myself missing the intimacy and small-scale where if the party finds a footprint of something twice as big as a man they regard it as unusual and possibly worrisome, and speculate what it might be. There’s an often unappreciated advantage of a world where the players can assume that they can know or learn enough about the world that they can make educated guesses: a footprint like that could be an ogre, or possibly a troll. Are we prepared to face one of those? In a wilder setting there’s no point speculating because it could be anything at all, and there’s a good chance that it’s unique anyway2.

I will say that Gonzo is easier to run, or at least as my campaigns go on they tend to get more Gonzo from where ever they started. It’s easy to slip in Gonzo elements, it’s much harder to dial them back or remove them. How are you going to keep them down on the farm once they’ve seen Paree?

I don’t have any solution to this dilemma. I’m like the Rum Tum Tugger, the cat that’s always on the wrong side of every door. The real solution, I guess, would be to play enough D&D that I could scratch both itches.

1 – The Fairies, by William Allingham

2 – And no, before you ask, the player saying “Can I roll a Nature or Arcana check to see if I recognize the kind of footprint?” is not, to me, the same thing at all.

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D&D and The Art of the Steal

So, I’ve been thinking again (as one does) about Thieves’ skills and bonuses in OD&D and B/X lines. I wrote about this before, in It Takes A Thief back in 2008. Nowadays, Original Edition Delta has a nice simplification of calculating them to eliminate the weirdness of the percentiles (that are almost always increments of 5% anyway) by just using the Thief’s level as a modifier on a Target 20 roll, but by design it sticks very close to the RAW chances of success. The problem, for me and my players at least, is those numbers are so low for everything except climbing that the thief shouldn’t bother trying them unless there’s nothing really riding on it or they’re almost to “name” level: you don’t hit 55% in anything except climb until level 7 in OSE(B/X) . That’s pretty much the opposite of how you want a thief to play. There is a school of thought that you should just drop the Thief as a class, and “if you want to be a Thief, steal something” but I’ve encountered a lot of players over the years whose favorite class is Thief, so there’s something about the archetype that speaks to them and I want to accommodate that.

Using the interpretation that Thief skills are near-magical abilities (I think due to Philotomy: anyone can hide, but a Thief can hide in shadows) doesn’t really help. Even if you don’t mind the flavor of thieves with semi-mystical abilities, they’re still not going to do it with any degree of reliability until near the end of the campaign. Other adjustments such as allowing repeated tries or treating a miss as indicating success but after a delay, proportionate to how much you missed by kind of works for some things like picking a lock that it might be possible to attempt until you get it right… but for something like moving silently that’s no help at all, and still leaves it that you shouldn’t bother rolling unless it’s either desperate enough that you have nothing else useful you could try on your turn or you have no real pressure and the Referee should just give it to you and move on.

Taking a step back, how reliable should these skill be at first level? Well, how powerful are they? The answer is “not very.” A first level Fighter will hit an unarmored opponent about half the time (give or take about 5% depending on edition), and on the average that hit will kill a 1 HD foe. A first level Magic User can cast a spell (admittedly once a day) that can also on the average slay a 1 HD creature regardless of AC (Magic Missile) or put up to 2 dice worth of 1 HD creatures to sleep (or proportionately less up to a max of 4 HD creatures). And the first level Thief can… open a lock? Hide?

Looking at it this way, is there any reason in the game not to make the default success rate for Thieves’ abilities pretty much the same as for Fighters? About 50% of the time it works, at least in the typical situation you’d find on the first level of the dungeon or back in town? If you can actually open the chest, or find the trap, or move silently past the guard that doesn’t seem like it would break the adventure… unless your adventure assumes that the players would never be able to do that. And if you’re writing adventures like that, well I won’t tell you to stop, but maybe you should get rid of Thieves as a class.

So, where does that leave us? I think for OED, I’d just make it Target 10; for more or less by-the-book B/X or Old School Essentials you could keep the percentiles and just add 50%, but my inclination is to make it about half-way between OSE and OED. Use a d20 and resolve, but adjust the percentiles by dividing by 10% (rounding down) giving a bonus range from +0 to +10 and allowing the Thief’s Dexterity modifier to apply. The Target Number would 10 for 1st level challenges (the kind you’d find while fighting 1 HD creatures) but scale with the level of the dungeon (5th level dungeon has TN 15 locks) or the equivalent in overland/city adventures. A wealthy merchant can probably afford Target 15 locks, a 10th level Lord Target 20. That way the challenges for Thieves roughly keep pace with the challenges that the Fighters and Magic Users are facing in terms of AC and spells saves. I like that this makes it really easy to convey a sense of some tasks are harder than others even for master Thieves while still letting the players have a good guess of how hard it’s likely to be instead of springing modifiers on them lock-by-lock. Keep the usual 1 is automatic miss, 20 is automatic success from the combat system. For Pick Pockets instead of looking for rolls of more than twice the chance of success to see if the Thief is caught, I’d change it to getting caught if the Thief misses by more than the Thief’s own level.

There you have it, a pretty minimalist change that I think opens up the play possibilities for Thieves a great deal. Even a first level Thief has at least a coin-flip’s chance of accomplishing any of their core abilities, while retaining the flavor of the old school Thief with the slightly different advancement of the distinctive Thief skills.

Update: Just to make it clear, I do let non-Thieves try any of the Thief skills (except read scrolls). They roll as 0-level Thieves: 1d20 versus whatever the target is with no bonus, not even attribute modifiers. High attributes only help if you have the slightest idea how to apply them properly; I don’t want high Dex, say, to automatically be as good as a Thief who had to work for those levels.