Category: Legacy D&D

Older D&D Editions

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The Land of Nonesuch

I’ve been working a bit on the setting for my game with the kids, which is also my backup game for the Bumblers, possibly a play-by-forum game in the future if I get my act together,  and finally an example setting for the system (tentatively titled The Majyc System).  So it needs a name, and possibly a hook.  I’m a little leery of the “elevator-pitch” approach to game settings; too often they end up sounding like something out of They Fight Crime: “He’s an all-American white trash shaman haunted by an iconic dead American confidante She’s a beautiful antique-collecting femme fatale from a secret island of warrior women. They fight crime!”  On the other hand, there’s certainly something to be said for being able to succinctly state what the game is about, and give the players an expectation of the tone and kind of adventures they’ll be playing.  And bog-standard dungeon bash doesn’t sound all that thrilling, even if you’re confident that playing it will be a blast.

For now, I’m calling it the Land of Nonesuch, and working on the premise that (unknown to the current crop of characters) they’re inhabiting a land described in a book of odd and somewhat macabre fairy tales called The Land of Nonesuch, by the mysterious George Jester.  Both the book and the author appear both in our world, and in the land the book describes.  My overall plan, if something so vague and inchoate can actually be called such, is that this setting will let me scratch several itches that I’ve had for quite a while now: running a game in a setting inspired by The Book of Weird, and by the Oz books; getting some use from various cast-off pieces of prior settings (such as the settings of the games with the Three Paladinos, and the one-shot To Rescue the Sun) and swiped from other people’s settings (like Thool, or Dwimmermount); to do some bottom-up setting design, where I haven’t worked out a whole map of the setting and a thousand years of history before I begin; and finally, putting that all together, to do some gaming where I haven’t systemetized everything and there’s not a way that magic or religion works, and I’m not pinging the players with info-dumps.  Naturally, I have ideas on things I want to see in the setting, and spring on the characters, but I want to be much more encouraging of letting the players make up crazy stuff too, and just rolling with it.  I want to recapture, at least for some of the time, some of the much more free-wheeling GMing I did in my youth, where a lot of stuff was decided on the basis of either “Yeah, that sounds good!” or “roll a die, high is good.”

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Random Exotic Traits Table

  1. Is a Shape-shifter
  2. Is a Were-Creature
  3. Inherited 1d10 * 100 times the usual starting money
  4. Has Random Magic Item
  5. Has an Unusual Pet
  6. Has a Magical Power
  7. Inherited a Noble Title
  8. Gets one Wish,which may be used before the start of play or saved
  9. Never fumbles (ignore rolls of 13)
  10. Savant: automatically has rating of 6 + 1d6 in starting Talent

You’re allowed to roll for an Exotic Trait if you have no Stats above 11 and at least one stat less than 9.  This is inspired by Mac’s campaign, where she has a similar rule where you can be a shape-shifter if you have no stats other than Charisma that are higher than 11.

Shape-shifters roll a d100 on a table of random animals, ranging from aardvark to zebra.  Were-creatures have the standard immunities to weapons except silver, and so on, but it’s a genuine curse, complete with attempting to eat people when the moon is full.  In both cases clothes and equipment don’t shift.

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Refusal to mourn the death by Orc-blade of a child in a dungeon

For after the first character, there is another

Stonehell claimed its first victim in the kids’ game last night, as Charlie’s character Revenge fell to a mighty critical by an orc.  The dice weren’t particularly kind to him on his new character, either, which he promptly dubbed Expendable 1401, though really it’s pretty much average:

Expendable 1401: Human Fighter Str 8  Int 12  Wis 11 Con 7  Dex 12  Cha 11  Siz 14 Lk 9

King, Oxy-lock’s war dog also succumbed in that fight, though an impressive miracle from Horatia (Grace) brought him back (about a 1 in 1440 chance, if I calculated the odds right).  This cheesed Charlie off a bit, but it wasn’t as if Grace saved her miracle for the dog…

It was a fun session, with a lot of Orc and rat bashing thanks to a pair of random encounters right outside the orc’s watch-post in the Contested Corridors area.  Things might have gone much worse if the party hadn’t managed to break the Orc’s morale with some threats in Orcish conveniently backed by a lucky Smite from Horatia and her false god.  They retreated to the surface with a great sense of satisfaction, and then spent the last ten or so minutes of the session giving Charlie’s new character a hard time because of the suspicious and weaselly way he chose to answer their questions about why he was on the island and whether he was Good.  I’m not entirely sure what that was about; I’m not a big fan of D&D alignment but I’m using it in this game for continuity with Mac’s  game, and Charlie made his character Lawful/Good so he had no reason to be evasive.

I was a little concerned that I let the gore level rise a bit too high, but the kids really seemed to get a kick out of it, and Mac thought it was ok when I asked, since I didn’t dwell on the descriptions.  I more or less took my cue from her and her rather gruesome bluff against the Orcs (“Look! Your bowels are coming out!”).  While I’m not trying to teach any moral lessons, and in the context of the game killing Orcs is jolly good fun, my personal preference is not to make combat too sanitary.  I think I achieved a reasonable balance, but as I said I had some qualms.

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The Ghoul’s Shrine

Well, I finished my One-Page Dungeon Contest entry and mailed it in.  It was interesting and fun, though I’m not sure that what I produced was any great shakes.  I spent a lot more time than I had planned just wrestling with the format and trying various tools.  I ended up drawing it free-hand with GIMP, using Chgowiz’s GIMP graph-paper template, mostly because that was the easiest way to guarantee that the result fit neatly into the dungeon template itself.  GIMP is far from my favorite tool for drawing, mostly because that’s not really what it’s for, it’s designed as an image manipulation tool; next time I’ll either figure out how to do what I want in Painter, or really spend some time learning either Inkscape or AutoRealm.  I fooled around with the latter two just enough today to realize that if I tried to use either I’d never have finished in time for the contest deadline.

One of the things I found interesting was just how easy and enjoyable it was to write a systemless dungeon; freedom from having to stat up anything at all let me write it for a party of completely indeterminate size, composition, and power level.  Of course, that means that whoever picks it up and tries to use it will be faced with plugging in numbers from their favorite system, but I deliberately stuck to just a few monster types to make that a little less painful.

On the other hand, it was a bit painful and frustrating to keep trimming the text to stick to a single page.  It pretty much precluded introducing any unique monster or puzzle, and drastically cut down on the flavor text.  I think that Chgowiz’s template really comes into its own when it’s used the way Amityville Mike does in Stonehell: a single page for the map, wandering monster table and notes, and a separate page or two for the key.  That’s definitely my plan for my next project, which will probably be a sample dungeon for my RPG write-up.

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I Need A Miracle

I mentioned in my prior post that I had replaced the D&D Clerical spell lists and spells per day for the old-school D&D game I was running for the kids with a system that involved saving rolls to get miracles, and the Recursion King asked for a bit more detail, so here it is:

Basically, clerics get to pray for Boons, Blessings, Smiting and Miracles.  Boons are subtle aid to the Priest personally, Blessings are subtle aid to others, Smiting is subtle (and not-so-subtle) hindrance of enemies and Miracles are overt, even spectacular, interventions by the God.  Subtle effects are ones where the players can’t actually tell whether they worked or at least whether there was magic involved, so things like pluses to saving rolls, or a second wind (restoration of some stamina).  Overt effects are ones where there’s no doubt that it wasn’t just luck, something supernatural happened–so for instance, Cure Light Wounds would count as a miracle since the wound closes up and the character is restored to health.

The cleric announces what he’s praying for (“Grant me a boon, oh mighty one!”  or “I bless you in the name of my lord!”, etc.) and I secretly roll a saving roll.  Boons are the easiest, with other effects getting progressively harder to achieve, though since I still want low-level clerics to be able to heal even miracles aren’t that hard (I use 15, 16, 17, and 18 as the target numbers, with the roll getting bonuses for high Wisdom and for increasing level).  Clerics also have a secret stock of Faith, which starts each day equal to Wisdom.   If the saving roll is missed, then the effect still occurs, but Faith is reduced by enough to make up the difference; if there isn’t enough Faith remaining then the Prayer fails.  Every time the cleric makes the save without needing to draw on Faith, then the secret Faith score increases by 1, even if this would take it higher than the initial number.

This pretty much guarantees that the cleric will be able to do something each day, with higher level clerics being able to succeed more often.  It also makes it a bit wiser to not try for an outright miracle every time.  Because I don’t share the Faith score with them or tell them whether the Boons or Blessings had any effect (just figuring it into the subsequent rolls), they can’t calculate for sure what the odds are or even if they’ve definitely got some more divine help coming to them.

If the cleric succeeds, then I roll for the impressiveness of the effect.  This is still a little hand-wavey at the moment, but what I do is roll a d6, with high being good.  The roll is open-ended, so every time I roll a 6, I add and reroll.  The final score divided by 3 is the approximate level of power of the effect, judged against the usual D&D spell list.  That is, 1-3 is roughly equivalent to a 1st level spell, 4-6 a second level, 7-9 a third level, etc.   I try not to just pick a spell directly, but pick an effect that I feel is about right for that level of power.  This isn’t modified in any way for the level of the Cleric; I figure that the god is more likely to listen to the prayers of the High Priest multiple times a day than a rank novice, thanks to the High Priest’s long record of service but that once the god has directed his attention to the matter it’s entirely up to the god’s inscrutable assessment of how much to intervene so that first level Cleric is just as likely to get a truly astonishing intervention as the High Priest.

It’s true that under this system 1/6 of the time any priest at all will get at least the equivalent of a 3rd level spell, and 1/36th of the time even more, but at low levels they’ll likely only get one or two prayers answered per day before they’re tapped out.  A high level priest isn’t guaranteed a high level result, but stands a much better chance just from more attempts.  It would be easy enough to adjust it by including a level bonus for the effect as well, if high level priests weren’t getting their fair share of truly impressive interventions, but I figure it’ll be a while before I need to worry about that.  It would also be easy to flesh out what happens in terms of the prayer’s effect according to some kind of table, or even just picking exactly from the cleric spell lists, but for now I’m really digging the aspect that when a Mage casts a spell they get what they want, but if a Cleric tries sometimes they just might find they get what they need.

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The Kids are All Right

Friday and Saturday I ran the D&D game that I talked about earlier, using D&D (actually LL/BFRPG) with a bunch of house-rules that took it a bit closer to Mac’s house-rules.  I could have run it straight, I suppose, but where’s the fun in that?  I did keep it close enough that I could use material published for D&D and retro-clones with only such conversion as I could do in my head on the fly, which let me use Amityville Mike’s Stonehell as the dungeon.  I even kept the name, explaining it in game a corruption of “Stone Hill” (which the PCs figured out by casting Read Script on one of the tapestries in the ruined banquet hall).

Overall the sessions went extremely well.  We got off to a slow start Friday when the youngest spent a bunch of time finding a place to buy and then purchasing a war dog.  I have no idea where he came up with the idea, but since that kind of creativity is something I want to encourage, I went with it…though it cost him all his starting money plus borrowing some from the party.  It turned out to have been a good purchase, saving their bacon at least twice Saturday when they finally found some non-empty rooms in the antechamber: first against the giant rats and then the Orcs attracted to the sounds of the fighting.   The kids were a little frustrated at first, I think, with how much of the area around the entryway was empty, but since a big part of this exercise was to get them used to the idea that there was not a single right way to play D&D (coincidentally the way their GM, who’s also their mom, runs things) I stuck to the key as written and just used their encounter with the Dwarves examining the Architectural Masterpiece to tell them what general direction to go to find trouble.

The party consisted of:

  • Umbry (played by the mom), a Rogue (Mage/Thief),
  • Hermia traveling under the name Horatia (played by the eldest daughter, 12), a Charlatan (Priest/Thief).  Charlatans are genuine Priests, but not of the false god they pretend to worship in order to bilk people.
  • Revenge (played by the middle son, 9), a Fighter
  • Oxy-lock (played by the youngest son, 7), a Mage
  • King, the war dog…Oxy-lock’s pet

Two of them “died”, reduced to 0 HP, but were saved by timely miracles from Hermia/Horatia.  Basically I scrapped the whole clerical magic system and replaced it with the ability to make saving rolls asking the god for blessings and miracles–so the equivalent of Cure Light Wounds counts as a “miracle”; the intent was to make clerical magic feel more miraculous and not just an alternate spell list for a different flavor of mage.  This worked really well in play, and the two characters who were saved from death by Cure Light Wounds were sufficiently impressed that they are now converts to Hermia’s make-believe God of Good Fortune, Horatio (yes, her god is Horatio, and her nom-de-guerre is Horatia, after the god).  She managed to cast it twice because she rolled really well the second time.

Another thing that pleased me a lot was the way the Morale rules (bog-standard D&D) ended the combats without always fighting to the death, and the way they negotiated with a captured Orc to get useful intelligence about traps up ahead and then didn’t slaughter him out-of-hand.  I did decide that the critical hit rules I was using were still a bit too deadly despite the fact that I deliberately avoided creating any kind of insta-kill or damage multiplier, so I’ve toned them down a bit for the future.

Everyone had a good time, and the mom was particularly pleased at how the kids were catching on to the differences between the way we handled things, despite many cries of “You’ve got to be kidding me!” from the youngest when rulings didn’t go the way he expected–but since he sometimes said that for things such as the fact his 7 STR Mage couldn’t wield the battle axe they got from the Orc chief, which wouldn’t have flown in his mom’s game either, I didn’t let it bother me.

I’m looking forward to running this again in the near future.

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D&D Alignment

Advanced Gaming & Theory: Pet Peeve: Detect Alignment

I THINK THAT EVERY body has a “pet-peeve” or something that bugs them about a game system itself. For me, that pet-peeve was largely spells used for detecting alignment. Now, this stems from playing the game incorrectly when our group was still learning, and not detecting our error, thus never fixing it. But this spell still bugs me to this day. It just seems like one of those things which was put into the game to make the Dungeon Masters life miserable.

Tim Ripper goes on to talk about how he deals with alignment, basically by neutering it. NPCs and PCs don’t actually know their own alignment, good characters can do bad things and vice-versa, the Detect Alignment spell is basically useless: easily fooled, obvious when it’s cast, considered a hostile act or even a prelude to an attack, and so forth.

But I have to ask, why have alignments in your game, then? What’s the point if they’re secret even from the players, you have to nerf certain spells to keep them that way, and even the GM can’t use them as a guide to behavior? I think it’s far simpler to just remove it from the game, which is pretty much what we did back in the day. Trying to keep alignment in the game without making it actually useful or having noticeable game-world consequences strikes me as more trouble than it’s worth.

Generally, there seem to me to be two and a half standard fruitful approaches to really using D&D alignment as part of the game world without running into the problems of having players run around casting Detect Alignment and short-circuiting any kind of real moral reasoning or thinking about the motives of the NPCs.

Approach 1 is that Alignments are sides in a cosmic war. Your alignment says which side you are on in the war, and nothing more. There can be honorable, maybe even admirable people and creatures on the Chaotic side, though perhaps few and far between, just as there can be complete rat-bastards on the Lawful side. Your alignment in particular says nothing about how you treat people in petty day-to-day things, whether you lie, cheat, give to charity, keep your word,  and so forth. Alignment detection spells detect which side’s uniform you’re wearing, as it were.  This was easier to pull off without confusing modern sensibilities when the alignments are just Chaos and Law, instead of the two-axis AD&D Law vs. Chaos and Good vs. Evil, but is still possible.

A subset of approach 1 (the “and a half”) is that humans and most other creatures don’t even really count in the cosmic war. Only supernatural entities and magic actually have concrete alignment, and that’s what spells detect. Ordinary mortals might have tendencies, but they’re really weak stuff compared to the real thing, and don’t register even when they’re conscious allegiances.

Approach 2 is that alignments are the Gods’ eye-view score card of your behavior: how the Gods view your actions according to their moral lights.  This makes Alignment, though perfectly concrete and detectable, more like having a prison record or past citations and medals for good works.  “Past record is no guarantee of future performance.”  Still, you’d have to be willfully stupid to ignore the evidence that alignment offers when deciding whether to put someone in a position of trust.  None of this namby-pamby alignment detections exists, but there are social taboos against using it guff.   You want a position of trust, you submit to the alignment check, just as today you submit to a background check in any kind of sensitive position.

What you don’t want to do, in my opinion, is make alignment exist, but be useless.  Either figure out the ways it plays out in the game world and deal with it (perhaps just giving up the cliche of the vizier “secretly” being evil), or strike it from the books and say that in your game world people steer by whatever their own personal moral compass is… different religions and philosophies advocate different things but there is no one universal measure, magical or otherwise, that can be applied.  Keeping it but figuring out all kinds of reasons that nobody does or should do the obvious things given its existence just magnifies its flaws.

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Thinking of the Children

I’m going to be running a game for my friend Mac and her three children (ages 7 through 12) in the near future.  She’s been playing D&D with them for a few months now, and I’ve been a player for some of the sessions.  When I mentioned that even though I sometimes had a hankering to run the kind of dungeon-crawlish games that she runs, none of my regular players was into them,  she suggested that I should run for them sometimes.  Among other things, she’d like them to have experience with GMs other than her, so they don’t become one of “those kind” of players who insist that there’s only one right way to play, coincidentally the way their first GM ran things.

I’m not quite sure what I want to run, though.  Mac has been running what she calls D&D pretty much the same way, in the same setting, for almost 27 years now, but with house rules so extensive that it scarcely seems like D&D sometimes (e.g. rolling 3d6 lower than Dex to hit, armor doing damage reduction only, magic via a spell-point system, clerics using a different seemingly ad-hoc system, etc).  That’s what the kids and I have been playing, but I wouldn’t be able to run it even if I wanted to since so much of it seems to exist only in her head.  I gave the two elder children their own copies of one of the retro-clones for Christmas (Basic Fantasy Roleplaying Game, not to be confused with the Chaosium Basic Roleplaying) and the younger of the two has actually been using it, more or less, to create dungeons and play with his friends.  He’s already added a new Body Builder class to the game though I’m not sure anybody he’s played with has yet met its rather stringent stat requirements….

So my first thought was to run that, since the rules are sort of familiar to them, and I would rather spend my time playing the game than explaining the difference between the rules they have (or their mom uses) and the rules I’m using.  My second thought, though, is to use Tunnels & Trolls, since I’d kind of like to try GMing that…. but I know that there’s some stuff about it (particularly the very abstract combat) that may be just too different from what they’re used to.  Mac basically uses a blow-by-blow accounting of combat, with turns lasting a couple of seconds, if that.  So my third thoughts have to do with either swiping a couple of things I really like from T&T and putting it into BFRPG, or vice-versa.  One thing I always get hung up on is that I don’t really like the magic system in the retro-clones.  Magic as ammo loads just doesn’t thrill me, unless you go full out Vance with it as depicted in the Dying Earth… but then you have to tweak both the spells and the MU’s combat capabilities anyway.  And Mac hates Vancean magic almost as much as she hates point-buy systems where you can design a character that’s practically a super-hero from the outset.

And finally, my fourth thoughts are to go ahead and finish the retro homebrew that I was working on, which would finally give me an old-school inspired system that really fits the way I’d like to play as well as players who will be happy to play it….  as usual with me when I start a project I ping-pong back and forth, unable to settle on any one option. I have a couple of weeks, at least, before we’d first play, so I don’t have to decide tonight, but I should decide soon and start working on a dungeon for them.

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Hot Off the Presses

And just in time to run a memorial game on the anniversary of Gary Gygax’s death one year ago:

RetroRoleplaying: The Blog: Microlite74 Version 2.0 Now Available

Microlite Version 2.0 is now available for free download. Over 2000 copies of Microlite74 version 1.1 have been downloaded since its release on October 6th last year. Microlite74 is dedicated to the memory of E. Gary Gygax and Version 2.0, which is even closer to that the very first edition of the world’s most popular fantasy roleplaying game he co-authored over 30 years ago, is being released on the first anniversary of his passing.

Plus, if you look on the very last page, you’ll see I got an acknowledgement (under my nom de comment jamused) for help in proofreading. And if that’s not a reason to download it, I don’t know what is!

Seriously, though, Microlite74 is a solid rule-light approach to Old School RPGs in the spirit of the old D&D boxed set (0e) for those who think even retro-clones like Swords & Wizardry are too crunchy.  It’s intended more as a guide for those are familiar with D&D3 and d20 and want to try a simplified rule set that has more of the feel of the original D&D  than a complete introduction to role-playing for the novice.  Check it out!

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Adventures in Arithmetic

Or: Why D&D 3.5 is no fun.

I love my friend Russell like a brother, and I’ll gladly play any game that he wants to GM, but I’m so looking forward to him switching systems some time in the near future as he’s planning to do.  As long as we’re not in combat, the game and setting are entertaining as all get-out, but as soon as we roll init…ugh.  There’s just no part of “You rolled a 13, plus 11 for your Attack Bonus, plus 1 for the prayer, minus 5 for the Combat Expertise, minus 5 for it being your second attack is 15…you hit!” that’s exciting.  It’s possible that if we played every week, instead of about once a month for half a year, that we’d get so used to the system–or learn to take notes that pre-figure all the standard options we usually choose in battle–that it would be mercifully quick.   But it still wouldn’t be very exciting, in my opinion.  It has all the panache and tension of doing SAT practice problems.  Continue that sort of thing for a half-hour or more, and I’d honestly rather that we went system-less.

That’s not to say that my current favorite system, Savage Worlds, is without flaw in this regard.  I think that on the whole modifiers are a bit less common and tend to be applied more homogeneously (e.g. the penalty for multiple actions in a round applies to every action in the round, so at least you only have to figure it once at the beginning), and there is an actual requirement that certain kinds of maneuvers (e.g. Tricks) get a description to justify them rather than a bare announcement of the attempt, but on the flip side the die-rolling has the possibility of being more complex with the open-ended rolls and I could see it falling into a similar if shallower rut of “let’s all do some arithmetic now!”  At least in Savage Worlds, I think I see how to speed things along in combat and making the combat more dynamic and descriptive; with D&D 3e, I honestly think that the more dynamic the combat gets in terms of options for the players, terrain, facing, environmental conditions, spells, maneuvers and abilities, the worse it becomes in terms of arithmetic as the bonuses and penalties come and go and fewer things can be pre-calculated.  I don’t really see much of a way to improve that without stripping player options; stacking mods on a roll of a d20 is pretty much the essence of the system.

The bottom line is that with 3e, I end up hoping that we don’t get into any combats, so that we can continue to have a fun time.   That’s probably less than optimal for D&D.