Apparently Hasbro has just released a skirmish-level fantasy miniatures war game that they’ve named after the old fantasy role-playing game, Dungeons and Dragons. Confusingly, some of the fans say that it still is a role playing game, just stripped of all the boring stuff like anything that occurs outside of combat.
Convalescing is not Awesome
After playing some more D&D with my friend Russell over the weekend (using the introductory dungeon from Basic D&D), what struck us is just how much time 1st level characters spend resting up to go back into the dungeon. The pace is basically: fight a monster, retreat into town to rest a week, go back in and fight another monster, rinse and repeat. When even the strongest party member (the fighter with 9 HP) can be reduced to 1 or 2 HP by a single blow, and the MU can cast 1 spell a day, not resting up completely after each battle is just asking for Total Party Kill. But even if you hand-wave getting out of the dungeon, resting, and coming back to the same room, it’s a real buzz-kill. At least in 3e, the cleric will have one or two Cure Light Wounds spells that will let the party press on, and after the first adventure the party casters can easily create several scrolls (basically a 1st level scroll costs 37.5 gp and 1 xp and takes one day to make).
To address this, I propose the following House Rules:
Binding Wounds
After any combat, you can take time to bind up the wounds of the injured, which involves cleaning them, sewing them up, applying bandages, etc. Binding a character’s wounds will restore up to 1 Hit Die (maximum roll on a die for that class including any con bonuses or penalties), not to exceed the character’s full HP. It requires 1 turn (10 minutes) per HP restored, and a First Aid Kit (cost 1 gp, bandages for 10 uses). If you don’t have a First Aid Kit, a the DM’s discretion you may improvise, but the DM may rule that it’s less effective (fewer than a full HD restored) or risks disease. You may not rebind already bound wounds to get even more HP back if you are down by more than 1 HD worth of Hit Points.
example: Forrest, a 2nd level thief with a +1 Con bonus has 7 HP. During a battle he takes 6 HP, leaving him with one. After the battle he can perform First Aid on himself and heal up 5 HP (4 for Thief HD +1 for Con), so that he’s back up to 6 HP. In a subsequent battle he takes another 2 HP, down to 4. When he binds his wounds after that battle, he can only get back the 2 he just took (putting him back at 6), not a full 5. If the DM finds it too much bookkeeping to track how many hits a character has taken in a battle (qualifying them for a full HD restored by Bind Wounds), he can wave this restriction, but if he finds the players abusing it (e.g. by seeking to take a single point of damage so they can get another HD back), he should rein them in.
If you’re using the optional Skill rules, Binding Wounds is subsumed under the Healing skill; just substitute Max Hit Die for 1d3 points healed (the penalty for a natural 20 still remains 1d3).
Spell Re-Memorization
At any point, a spell-caster (MU, Elf, or Cleric) may spend an hour to memorize (or meditate for) a single First Level spell, even if they’ve already cast all their daily First Level spells. If they haven’t already cast a First Level Spell, then one spell is forgotten to make room for the new one. Because of the complexity of spells higher than First Level, those can only be prepared when the spell-caster is fresh after eight hours of rest.
Justification
Basically, this is just providing an alternate way of accomplishing what first level characters have to do anyway, which is start each encounter fresh. It shouldn’t unbalance higher level characters, since by the time characters reach higher levels they’ll almost always have magical means of recuperating and/or extra spells in the form of wands, scrolls, and potions. In addition, at higher levels a single HD or one more 1st level spell is hardly anything. It also helps a bit with the “oops, I memorized the wrong spell, guess we’ll turtle until tomorrow” problem; it won’t change the course of a battle, and if the characters don’t have anyplace in the dungeon safe to hole up they run the risk of additional random monster encounters, but it should keep the game moving forward.
There’s certainly a possible draw-back that a party might choose to try and rest for an hour after each battle, even if they haven’t taken any damage, just so the spell-caster can get back a spell, but since they still have to deal with random encounters and that’s not so different from what they are tempted to do anyway, I think it won’t be that bad. And I see the spell-caster’s, particularly magic-users, being more ready to cast a spell and more able to take advantage of utility spells as a plus. A low-level MU would be crazy to memorize Analyze or Read Languages as one of his two or three spells for the day, but spell-casters have much more chance to shine (and pull their weight as something other than user-of-mu-only-devices) if you don’t make it a death-sentence to take full advantage of their spell lists.
What AD&D Character Am I?
I Am A: True Neutral Human Wizard (5th Level)
Ability Scores:
Strength-10
Dexterity-12
Constitution-11
Intelligence-17
Wisdom-13
Charisma-14
Alignment:
True Neutral A true neutral character does what seems to be a good idea. He doesn’t feel strongly one way or the other when it comes to good vs. evil or law vs. chaos. Most true neutral characters exhibit a lack of conviction or bias rather than a commitment to neutrality. Such a character thinks of good as better than evil after all, he would rather have good neighbors and rulers than evil ones. Still, he’s not personally committed to upholding good in any abstract or universal way. Some true neutral characters, on the other hand, commit themselves philosophically to neutrality. They see good, evil, law, and chaos as prejudices and dangerous extremes. They advocate the middle way of neutrality as the best, most balanced road in the long run. True neutral is the best alignment you can be because it means you act naturally, without prejudice or compulsion. However, true neutral can be a dangerous alignment because it represents apathy, indifference, and a lack of conviction.
Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.
Class:
Wizards are arcane spellcasters who depend on intensive study to create their magic. To wizards, magic is not a talent but a difficult, rewarding art. When they are prepared for battle, wizards can use their spells to devastating effect. When caught by surprise, they are vulnerable. The wizard’s strength is her spells, everything else is secondary. She learns new spells as she experiments and grows in experience, and she can also learn them from other wizards. In addition, over time a wizard learns to manipulate her spells so they go farther, work better, or are improved in some other way. A wizard can call a familiar- a small, magical, animal companion that serves her. With a high Intelligence, wizards are capable of casting very high levels of spells.
Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)
I’m pretty puzzled by being True Neutral, actually. I would have expected Lawful Neutral, Neutral Good or even Lawful Good; I suspect the test conflates respect for authority and parents with respect for the law. By the detailed scores, it appears I was pretty close. And I only have one evil bone in my body (I know which question it was, too…. the one about if the elders in your family strongly disapprove of your actions, what do you do. Ignoring them wasn’t an option.)
D&D House Rules
I’m going to call the Basic/Expert/etc line “D&D”, distinguishing it from O(riginal)D&D (the white box), and A(dvanced)D&D. D&D is therefor the game we played last Sunday.
Demihumans and character classes
Demihumans can choose to be a different character class, so you are allowed, e.g. Elven Fighters or Halfling Thieves, and are treated exactly as any human of that class (including for level maxima) but:
1) You still must meet all the racial minima to be of that race
2) You get none of the special abilities of your race, which are assumed to come from training that you’re neglecting in order to learn the abilities of your new class, except:
a) Dwarves and Elves retain their infra-vision
c) Halflings retain their Save vs. Death Ray/Poison, and Halfling Thieves retain their racial Hide abilities.
Sharing Spells
The D&D rules forbid Magic Users letting other magic users copy spells from their books, but don’t really explain it except as a cultural prohibition (nobody wants to risk their spell-book); to make this more concrete, copying a spell from a Magic User’s book into another book erases the spell, the same way copying a spell from a scroll uses up the scroll. Magic Users teach their apprentices spells by creating a scroll with the appropriate spell, which the apprentice can then copy into their spell book per the usual rules.
Labyrinth Lord
Since some of you expressed an interest last week in laying your hands on Basic D&D so you can kick it old skool with your own bad selves, I suggested that you take a look at Labyrinth Lord. While you can get (possibly even legal) PDF scans of Basic D&D from RPGNow, which is where I got what we were using, you’re paying $5 for a not-particularly crisp scan ($10 if you want Expert as well). Labyrinth Lord is essentially Basic & Expert D&D as one book, released under the OGL as a free download. The rules themselves are the same, near as I can tell (with a few fiddly exceptions like rolling 3d8*10 for starting money, and Clerics being able to take spells at Level 1). All the text has been rewritten with an eye towards making it available under the OGL without it being in any way encumbered with any TSR intellectual property that hasn’t been explicitly released by Wizards of the Coast under the OGL. As a practical matter, the rules appear to be interchangeable, with only the organization and some minor terminology changing (e.g. Save vs. Dragon Breath is now Save vs. Breath Attack).
update:By the way, if you do decide you want to buy a pdf from rpgnow, you should probably get the D&D Rules Cyclopedia, which is the same price as either of the other two ($5), but has all the rules that were published for all the boxes: Basic, Expert, Companion, and Masters. What it lacks (the long introductory solo adventure and beginner dungeons), you are unlikely to need.
Sunday’s obsession is becoming d20 Krawl
Since very few people were there on Sunday, I should explain what happened. Josh said that Doug was thinking of doing a D&D game with interchangable characters, and that got me thinking. We could distill D&D characters down to a character card and equipment cards, give it a console-ish feel and still have it be D&D.
So, I started obsessing. Since then I have made boards for a dungeon, determined the changes I will make to d20 to make this work, made character sheets (a page of feat/spell/special ability data has appeared as well) and gotten graphics for 50 equipment cards.
I hope to get the chance to run this next Sunday (August 21?). If anyone would like to get a jump on things, you can go to http://www.pathguy.com/cg35lite.htm and make a first level character. There are a few limitations:
1) Magic Users may not specialize
2) Clerics do not choose domains
3) Attacks of Opportunity will be used, but ony a very simplified version. Don’t get any feats or skills that ONLY affect attacks of opportunity. (Combat Reflexes comes to mind.)
Anything else that comes up we can work out at the game.
I’ll put a short description of the world in the extended entry.
A New Superhero RPG
Eric Burns writes a glowing review of a new Superhero RPG, Truth & Justice, so of course, being a sucker for that kind of thing, I went ahead and bought the PDF.
Tales of the Rambling Bumblers 