Armor as Damage Reduction?

An obvious refinement in handling armor in RPGs is making armor reduce damage instead of the original D&D reducing the chance of taking damage. Intuitively that’s what armor does, right? It doesn’t make you better at dodging, it just reduces how much you get hurt when you get smacked. A lot of pretty good games over the years have taken that tack, including one of my favorite combat systems, the microgame Melee that formed the basis of The Fantasy Trip and later on GURPS.

The thing is, the phrase “roll to hit” is a misnomer. It’s really roll to hurt. We don’t, except in some special circumstances, really care if the blow missed completely or hit the armor and bounced off. What we want to know is if the blow actually hurt enough to bring the foe closer to defeat. From there it’s easy to see that the “space” of possible results from an attack are basically the same whether you treat armor as reducing the chance of rolling for damage or reducing the damage once rolled: the target isn’t hit at all, the target would have been hurt but for armor, and the target is hurt. Editions of D&D with rules for “touch attacks” only needing to beat the AC of an unarmored man make this explicit… really any attack that would have hit an unarmored man but didn’t beat the AC of the target can be presumed to have hit but failed to penetrate the armor¹.

In fact, the only real difference between the two approaches is that armor as damage reduction introduces an extra oddity that usually needs to be addressed. In the standard D&D AC system armor can make it unlikely that a blow scores a wound, but a blow that finds a chink in the armor can be just as deadly to an armored man as an unarmored man: an arrow to the eye slit² will kill a knight just as dead as a peasant. In contrast, in systems that use armor as DR it’s often the case that once you have a reasonable amount of armor, it becomes literally impossible for a single blow to kill an average man. If an arrow does 1d6 and chain armor stops, say, 4 points, then a first-level fighter with at least 3 HP can’t ever be killed with a single arrow.

To compensate for this, DR systems almost always add further complication. Typically they include “critical hits” that introduce the possibility that if you roll well the damage is then multiplied by some factor large enough for weapons to once again pose a deadly danger to the average man. Others will introduce things like differentiation between weapons that can pierce through the armor and weapons that will bounce off, so an arrow or warhammer might be more dangerous to a heavily armored fighter than a club or saber, or add “called shots” so that if you want to actually hurt a knight in plate armor with your arrow you have to take a penalty to the roll representing aiming for the eye slit. Which is all well and good, but wouldn’t actually be necessary if you hadn’t introduced the complication of damage reduction in the first place. It’s several extra steps to get back to “against heavy armor you need to get extra lucky or good if you want to do significant damage.”

When I was younger I used to heavily favor such complications; it’s only comparatively recently that I’ve come around to preferring the simpler “chance to hurt” abstraction. I still enjoy me a good critical hit, but I like ’em like Dungeon Crawl Classics or Arduin, where they are used to add a big dollop of flavor with results that are more specific and usually much grittier than a straight double hit point damage. In a system where damage is usually abstract: 3 points, 4 points, 8 points, it’s nice to have the occasional “your ear is torn off” or “your forearm is shattered” as long as it doesn’t become something you have to calculate every blow.

and when it comes to simulation, that’s probably a more accurate representation anyway. Most of the time if you’re hit while wearing armor you won’t take the same wound that an unarmored person would take, except shallower. If it didn’t find a weak point in your armor chances are you won’t take any damage at all, what damage you do take will often be in the form of a bruise or broken rib instead of a gash or hole in your flesh. The only game I can think of off-hand that did that level of simulation was CORPS, which took the physics-based intuition even farther and made armor reduce some damage, and then convert some of the remaining damage into less lethal concussion damage. Of course, at the level of abstraction Hit Points represent you could/should simply interpret differing amounts of damage as representing different levels of wound anyway, but if you’re doing that there’s even less reason to care whether “no damage” is a 13 on the to-hit roll vs AC 14 or a 10 on the to-hit roll vs AC 10 but a 3 on the damage die against 4 points of DR. ↩
a reasonable interpretation of rolling high damage against an armored knight, even if there’s nothing explicit in the mechanics dictating that’s where it hit. ↩

September 26, 2016January 26, 2017

Shields Shall Be Splendid!

The following presents a house rule for handling shields that makes sense to me for a more Sword and Sorcery than high medieval setting.

In most D&D-likes, shields are an afterthought. The bonus for carrying a shield is +1 or maybe +2 on a d20, which seems a little strange considering the prominent place shields have in actual history. There have been some attempts over the years to “fix” that with house rules, such as the nifty “Shields Shall Be Splintered” rule offered by Trollsmyth, giving the player an incentive to carry a shield in order to sacrifice it to avoid damage.

Still, that’s not that much of an incentive, particularly if shields are hard to come by in the middle of an adventure. There’s also another potential problem if you’re trying to run a campaign set in a period more reminiscent of the ancient world than the late medieval/early renaissance age of heavy plate armor, and particularly if you want the pulp Sword & Sorcery feel of something like a Conan comic.

If you want your combatants to look like this

not this

this

not this

this

not this

then the standard D&D-like rules could stand to be improved.

You can of course make it so the heavier armors just don’t exist in the setting, or are prohibitively expensive, or forbidden by law or custom except to certain social classes and only in certain situations, or lean heavily on encumbrance rules (no pun intended)… but doing so tends to make the characters like front-line fighters that rely on heavy armor in games more fragile…sometimes a lot more fragile. That’s not always a bullet you want to bite for an aesthetic preference. Another approach some people use is to either tie AC directly in to level, making armor irrelevant, creating some sort of swashbuckling class or option so certain characters can opt to use less armor without getting chopped to pieces or even provide “chainmail bikini” bonuses based on DEX or even CHA for a particularly Red Sonja comic-book take.

Here’s an alternate take: Make shields provide the bulk of the defensive bonus, with armor only being a secondary bonus unless you’re fighting without any shield. Here’s a chart of how this would work for an ascending AC game, with values based on Dungeon Crawl Classics.

Shield	AC bonus	Check Penalty
Off-hand Weapon/improvised	1	0
Buckler	2	0
Targe	3	-1
Roman Scuta	4	-1
Heater	5	-1
Kite	6	-2
Greek Hoplon	7	-2
Tower	8	-3

Using a shield and armor within 3 bonus of each other provides AC equal to the better of the two, plus 1. Using shield and armor more than 3 different, like full plate and a buckler, or leather armor and a tower shield just provides the better of the two bonuses. The Check Penalty is the worse of the two, minus 1, regardless of how close in bonus they are.

Using these rules, all the AC bonuses and check penalties stay the same for existing characters if they like, but there’s the option of shedding a bunch of armor to increase mobility and fit in better with actual historical shield/armor mixes such as Hoplon plus linen linothorax or just greaves and helmet, or targe and leather or hide, or even fantasy comic book targe or buckler and chainmail bikini. The bonuses are chosen with an eye on providing even min-maxers an incentive to keep to vaguely plausible combinations, even if plausible includes the likes of Frazetta’s Conan or Frank Thorne’s Sonja.

I think doing shield and armor this way allows for a wider variety of Sword & Sorcery or even anime setting tropes with minimal changes to game balance. If you’re not using DCC, you might have to adjust the bonuses and penalties if you want them to work out to the same as the existing combinations, but the changes should be slight.

September 19, 2016September 19, 2016

Viriconium

Currently you can get all four Viriconium books ( The Pastel City, A Storm of Wings, In Viriconium, and Viriconium Nights) in a single volume for $1.99 on Kindle. That’s a really good deal. I remember being really impressed with them when I was a teenager, so it’s probably time to re-read them.
Viriconium amazon link.

September 17, 2016September 18, 2016

Overland Encounters

I just realized I never posted this here, but here are my generic rules for overland travel and encounters for D&D-like games. The overloaded encounter die is pretty similar to the one Gus L uses in HMS Appolyon.

Checking for Events

Each day there are at least two checks for events: one during the day and one at night. Roll 2d6 to see if there are any additional events: if you roll doubles there’s an extra event that day. If the number on the face of the die is even, it’s an extra daytime event; odd is an extra nighttime event. If there is an extra event roll again… keep doing this, tallying the extra events, until you don’t roll doubles.

Examples

You roll a 9. No extra events that day, so just the one daytime and one nighttime.

You roll double 3’s, which is an extra nighttime event, and then roll again and get a 7. So that’s a total of one daytime event and two nighttime events to check for that day’s travel.

You roll double 2’s, then double 1’s, then a 4 (3 and 1). That’s an extra daytime event, and and extra night time event, for a total of two daytime event checks and two nighttime checks.

Daytime

For the daytime, check the travel speed of the group in hexes and roll a die to indicate in which hex the event will take place. E.g. if the group can travel 20 hexes a day on the current scale of the map, roll a d20. If the number of hexes doesn’t neatly fit on a die, use the next higher die and re-roll any that fall outside of the range. Count off the hexes traveled and when it reaches the number the event die shows, roll a d6 for the type of event. Note that hexes that are difficult terrain count as multiple hexes. E.g. if the event is supposed to happen in hex 7 of the day’s travel and after the fifth hex they enter a mountain hex that costs 3, the mountain hex counts as hexes 6, 7, and 8 of the day’s travel, so the event will happen mid-way through the hex.

If more than one event is going to happen in the day, roll as many times as there are events; if you roll a duplicate that means they happen at the same time.

Night Time

At night, roll once for the type of event, ignoring anything except an encounter or environmental.

If the players are setting watches, just roll a die to see which watch the event check occurs in.

Otherwise, or if you need an exact time (e.g. because some pre-planned event is going to happen at midnight) roll 1d12 to see what hour of the night the event occurs, starting at 5 P.M. You can either count, or add 17 to the roll, subtracting 24 if the result is 24 or higher and read that as the hour on a 24 hour clock. E.g. a roll of 1 indicates the event is at 18:00 (6 P.M.), a roll of 10 indicates the event is at 27 – 24 = 03:00 (3 A.M).

If more than one event is going to happen in the night, roll as many times as there are events; if you roll a duplicate that means they happen at the same time.

Type of Event

Encounter
Environmental/Potential Encounter
Exhaustion/Potential Encounter
Clue
Consume Resources
Setback

Encounter: Encounter some potential hostiles. See below.

Potential Encounter: Encounter some potential hostiles if the terrain cost is greater than or equal to the die roll. That is, if the hex costs 2 to enter then a 2 is an encounter but a 3 isn’t; if the terrain costs 3 to enter then a 2 or 3 is an encounter. This is cumulative with any other results on the table: a 3 in a mountain hex means an encounter and Exhaustion.

Environmental: Non-combat event specific to the particular environment. This can include encounters that are unlikely to be hostile even if they get a poor reaction, such as local peasants, travelling merchants, game animals, and so on.

Exhaustion: Take a short rest (1-hour) or suffer one level of Exhaustion.

Clue: Gain some information about something: evidence nearby monsters, settlements, other travelers, etc.

Consume Resources: Some of your resources are expended (lights, food, rope, etc.)

Setback: Something goes wrong and you lose some time, get lost, suffer an injury, find the way is blocked, etc.

Encounters

Surprise

Both sides roll a d6, on a 1 or 2 that side is surprised and cannot act this turn.

Encounter Distance

Roll a d6 during the day and a d4 at night, subtracting the hex’s terrain cost. The result is the distance at first sighting.

Bump into each other (can melee this turn)
Close (can charge this turn)
Medium (1d6 turns away, within direct arrow shot)
Long (2d6+6 turns away, within indirect arrow shot)
Extreme (2d6+12 turns away, 6 turns from being within indirect arrow shot)
Barely Visible (10 minutes+ from being within indirect arrow shot)

Evasion

If you want to avoid an encounter, then presuming you’re not surprised and the range is at least Medium, you can attempt to evade. If you have surprise you can evade automatically. Otherwise, the difficulty of evading the encounter depends on the size of your party and the size of the group you’re encountering. Roll less than or equal to the Target Number on 2d10.

Size of Party	Target Number on 2d10
	15
Small (<=4)	13
Medium (5-12)	11
Large (12-24)	9
Huge (25+)	7
	5

If the pursuing group is larger than your party, the target number becomes one step easier; if the pursuing group is smaller, it becomes one step harder. If the terrain isn’t clear, increase the TN by the terrain cost minus one. So, e.g. woods increase the TN (make it easier to evade) by 1, mountains or jungles by 2.

If you don’t like the odds, you can split your party into smaller groups in order to evade; of course the pursuers can do the same, but then at least if they catch up there are fewer of them.

Reactions

When you encounter potentially hostile NPCs or creatures they aren’t necessarily going to attack, depending on their purpose in the area and how your party is conducting itself. If you’re in enemy territory during wartime and you run into a patrol, a good roll on the reaction table isn’t going to save you from a confrontation, but guardsmen in a city are unlikely to simply attack you even if they’re “Hostile”…though they may look for an excuse to arrest you or run you out of town.

Roll 2d6	Reaction NPC/monster	Negotiation
2	Hostile/Attacks	Refuses & opposes (further rolls on locals -1)
3-5	Unfriendly/may attack	Refuses
6-8	Neutral/uncertain	Hesitant, may try again with better offer
9-11	Indifferent/Uninterested	Accepts
12	Friendly/Enthusiastic friendship	Accepts eagerly (+1 morale if hired)

September 17, 2016

Overland Travel

Another post that I never posted here, with a general way of handling overland travel based on the underlying Outdoor Survival/AD&D terrain and movement rates, simplified for easy use with pretty much any D&D-like.

These templates show the cost to enter¹ a hex on the overland travel map, with a key to how many hexes a party can move in a day based on the degree of encumbrance (for travelling on foot) or type of mount. The assumption is that roads and trails do not speed your travel enough to track, but they do allow you to pass over worse terrain as if you were on clear terrain. (mostly based on Delta’s discussion of the rates in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1e Dungeon Master’s Guide).

If the cost of entering a hex is more than a single day’s allotment (e.g. on heavy horse in a swamp with no road), you can either say it’s impassible, switch to a smaller scale map and have the party slog through taking multiple days, or make the minimum rate of travel 1 hex per day or 1 hex every other day.

This is by far my preferred approach, since it means no tracking of partial hexes. It also matches the way Outdoor Survival worked, which was the original source of the all the D&D movement rules…and by extension almost everything that came after. ↩

September 16, 2016September 16, 2016

SF Campaign Quiz

I stumbled across this when going through my old emails, and I thought it might interest some of you. This was a survey I sent out for a group I was going to run a SF campaign for once a month online; they had agreed they wanted to play some kind of SF campaign, but they weren’t sure what. Usually I’d start with an idea for the kind of campaign I felt like running, but since I was play-testing Zap! at the time, I was open to almost anything they wanted to try.

Tone

How serious do you want the tone of the campaign to be

Played for Laughs (Galaxy Quest)
Campy but played straight (Flash Gordon)
Straight, with leavening of humor (Star Trek Original Series)
Straight, with little or no humor (later season DS9)
Grim (Battlestar: Galactica remake)
Other:

Hardness of SF

How hard do you want the SF to be?

Sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic
Anything goes as long as you wave your hands sufficiently vigorously and invoke nano, quantum, or tachyons.
Stick to standard SF tropes like FTL travel and cloning, please.
At least make a stab at plausibility, don’t include anything known to be impossible without flagging it
Stick to actual speculative science
Everything has to be vetted by Scott (one of our two resident physicists)
Other:

Which of the following elements would you like to see? *

if there’s a conflict, these choices will override the previous answer in specific areas

Space ships
FTL Travel
Psionic powers
Alien life forms
PC alien races
Artificial intelligence
Teleportation/Matter transmission
Near Future
Alternate Present
Farther future, but Earth still known/relevant (3-400 years)
Far future, Earth history known but Earth lost
Earth? What’s that?
Terra-forming
Interstellar civilizations
Time travel
Extra-dimensional travel
Virtual worlds
Resurrection/Restore from Backup
Increased Longevity
Robot PCs
Interstellar War
“Uplifted” animals
Genetically engineered humans
Allegory and social commentary
Universal translators
Matter replicators
I’m good with any or none of the above
Other:

Campaign Structure

Episodic or Epic

Episodic: I want the stories to have discrete beginning, middle and end
Seasonal Arcs: I want the individual episodes to eventually add up to a larger arc, but that arc might be only one of several with these characters
Epic: I want one overarching story, with the bulk of what happens being driving that story forward
Non-dramatic: I want to explore and do stuff, and if I see any dramatic structure happening, I’ll zap it with my blast pistol.
Other:

Lethality

Should PCs die?

Never.
Only by player choice.
If they do something everybody agrees is lethally stupid
If they do something that the GM thinks is lethally stupid
If the dice say so
If the dice say so, but with player veto
Inevitably
Multiple times per session, thank goodness for backups
Multiple times per session, thank goodness characters are easy to create
Other:

Are the PCs special?

ordinary schmoes or heroes?

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, some have greatness thrust upon them. And then there’s the PCs
Ordinary folks thrown into extraordinary circumstances, trying to get by
Competent professionals, doing their jobs
Elite, the special squad within the ranks of the pros
We’re the A-Team, we get called in when the elite have failed
Legends, the ones that taught the A-Team everything they know
Mary Sue Squad
Other:

Scope

How far and wide do the PCs roam?

Based in a particular city-sized locale
Globe trotters
Interplanetary is an adventure
Interplanetary is a commute, Interstellar is an adventure
Interstellar commuters, Intergalactic adventurers
Time travelers
Dimension hoppers
Other:

September 14, 2016September 14, 2016

Thorgal!

Why did nobody tell me how great Thorgal is? (Ok, Trey Causey tried back in 2013, but I wasn’t reading his blog back then, and made the mistake of not crawling through all the archives when I added it to my list of must-reads. Mea culpa.)

Despite the name, Thorgal is not about Marvel’s new female version of Thor, but a Belgian fantasy comic that’s been produced since 1977, by the team of Jean Van Hamme (writer) and Grzegorz Rosiński (artist). It’s definitely in the science-fantasy mold, as Thorgal is an orphan from outer-space plopped down among the Vikings. Not too much is made of that, actually, except him having a great destiny. The first volume of the English translation goes into it, but apparently it was originally volume 7. I think for the English editions they moved it up to its chronological position, because they wanted to start with an “origin”?. This gives it a slightly odd feeling, since it originally served as a flashback and doesn’t have any of the foreshadowing devices you might expect if it was really the beginning of the story, but if you just let it flow I promise you’ll be richly rewarded.

I’m particularly taken with Aaricia, the cleverest princess of them all (not her actual billing, just my reaction to her). Whether it’s rescuing Thorgal, rescuing a god, or solving an ancient riddle Aaricia can always figure it out. Unfortunately I’m only three volumes in and she’s currently sidelined, but I’m hoping to see a lot more of her in the future.

Thorgal is more than just a viking slab of beef, particularly in terms of conscience, but it’s Aaricia, pictured above, that I really like.

update just finished volume three, and Aaricia saves the day as usual. Go Aaricia!

You can get the first book here (Amazon associates link, so conceivably I could get some money if you choose to order it via the link)

September 12, 2016September 12, 2016

Homebrewery – a tool for easy 5e formatting

Just ran across this tool for easily making pdfs and web pages in the style of the D&D 5e Player’s Handbook. Very useful if you’re writing D&D 5e home-brew material, or really any home-brew stuff that you want neatly formatted and don’t mind the D&D house style

For instance, here’s a link to one of my blog posts, basically just plopped into the Homebrewery with some minor fixup of the markup:

http://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/SysX_IV3/

Check it out.

September 11, 2016

Tracking Individual Initiative

http://www.armorclass10.com/products/keep-calm-and-roll-initiative

Despite what I said a while back about group initiative (was it really almost a year ago?), in our DCC game we’ve been using individual initiative, both ’cause that’s how DCC is written and ’cause it has some little flavorful fillips to it that make it more interesting. In DCC only Warriors increase Init bonus as they level, and two-handed weapon wielders use a d16 for Init instead of d20, both of which I quite like. But that means that I need to track individual initiative, so I came up with the following. Instead of using the traditional count-down (Does anybody go on 20? 19? etc.) I’ve made up a 3×5 card for each character with vital stats like AC, saves, etc. and I go through the count-down once, putting the cards in order of Init. I make one more card for the monster init, and an extra card representing the end of the round just to remind me if I need to check things like spell effects wearing off or random encounters.

I’m ashamed it took me so long to come up with something like this, because it works perfectly. Nobody ever gets missed, and there’s never any hesitation about what comes next. It’s fully as fast as my old stand-by just go around the table I use when I just can’t be bothered with init. I’m sure I’m not the first person to come up with this, but all of the discussions I recall and printed GM aids I’ve seen involve writing the character names on a list and either updating the init numbers and skipping around the list or redoing the list when init is rolled…which unless you’re using a computer at the table isn’t so slick. The one drawback I can see, besides the need for index cards or scraps of paper, is that if you roll for init every round putting the cards in order could be a drag…you’d essentially do one pass to order the cards and one pass through the cards to carry out the turn. I still think it might be worth it, but for a system like DCC where the init is rolled only at the start of combat, there’s no such problem.

January 29, 2016January 30, 2016

Searching it Old School

Here’s how I do it: only roll when you’re testing the character’s skill, not the player’s; roll when the player says they’re searching; only roll once per character; give the players the benefits of their own skill at coming up with ideas without rolling; and no pixel-bitching.

The Judge describes the scene to the player, including anything the character would automatically notice, whether it’s because it’s completely obvious or because it falls within the range of the character’s “Passive Perception” threshold (for games that use it, e.g. an Elf’s 2 in 6 ability to spot any hidden door they pass in OD&D was the very first passive perception check).“It’s an empty 20 by 20 room, with a chest in the middle of the floor. There are no obvious exits (because either there are none or the Judge secretly checked the passive perception and the character failed)”.
The player announces the character is searching, and optionally specific things to look for or methods of searching being tried.“I search the chest for traps, paying particular attention to whether there’s any kind of tripwire or pressure plate.”
If the player has said she’s looking for something that’s there, just give it to her, no roll. In addition roll as appropriate to see if the character’s knowledge and skill is enough to reveal any secrets.“There’s no tripwire or pressure plate, but you do notice there are some tiny holes in the floor right in front of the chest (rolled a success on the character’s ability to spot traps; if the trap was triggered by a tripwire or pressure plate the roll would have been irrelevant, but is included in case there were other things to notice that weren’t specifically mentioned).”

Why make the players announce it?

Searching beyond what’s apparent during a passive perception check involves actively moving about, touching things, looking closely at them, etc. The search roll covers everything generic the character has learned to do: the standard operating procedure as it were. But searching is likely to set off traps, depending on how they’re triggered, so it’s up to the player to announce whether they’re going to take that chance or they want to limit their activities to certain specific things until they decide it’s safe for a general search. As long as they’re not yet turning things over to the character’s training and experience to carry out, they don’t get the character’s skill roll to discover things.

Note that if they want to use the character’s skill to detect whether there are traps, they can go ahead and do that, but that itself requires an announcement, for the same reason: the activities necessary to look for traps might have consequences such as getting surprised by the spiders on the ceiling (assuming they failed their passive perception/surprise roll), and it’s not fair to spring that on the players unless they’ve made a choice.

What if the player wants to search again?

Originally this was handled by allowing re-rolls as long as the players were willing to spend the extra time, one ten-minute turn for every 10′ searched. While that’s legitimately old-school, it has the drawback that if there’s no time-pressure (e.g. there are no wandering monsters in the area or they’re not racing against a deadline) then the players are guaranteed to be able to find every secret they come across eventually, but it’s boring as all get-out to play it out. In actual play much of the time the resource being tested is the player’s patience. If you hand-wave it and just let them spend as long as it takes (maybe rolling to see how long that is), while you don’t waste as much table time you get this big and to my mind boring disconnect with the game world: “seven hours later you’ve finished searching the first room and found ten copper pieces that had fallen in the back of the garderobe”. Plus as anybody who has looked for something they’ve lost knows, even searching ’til you’re exhausted won’t necessarily uncover all the secrets.

On the other hand, if you only allow character skill to have one bite at the apple, the players are free to keep searching, but only if they can come up with specific, concrete plans. This allows for interesting brain-storming at the table, and if the players get bored they stop: they know there’s no further chance of uncovering anything if they’re out of ideas, so no temptation to try a few more rolls just in case. If they get a sudden idea later, they can come back to it (circumstances permitting) and try it out.

Why are player ideas a gimme?

If they announce they’re looking for something specific that’s really there, maybe they should still have to roll, perhaps with a bonus? No, if you do that and they fail they can’t know whether it’s a bad idea or a bad roll… which means they’d have to repeatedly search and that is tedious. When the rule is that if they are looking for the correct thing they automatically find it, they never have to repeat an idea just in case they got unlucky on the roll. If the thing is supposed to be really well hidden you can make them be more specific about exactly what they’re looking for or how they’re searching. Maybe an ordinary secret door can be found just by banging on the wall until you find where it sounds hollow (assuming that your spot hidden roll failed), while a well-hidden door that’s been padded to muffle the sound requires something more clever like you dust it with fine powder to see if you can find hand-prints where somebody has pressed a hidden catch. But you shouldn’t put the players in the position of having to guess whether they just need to repeat an action until it works.

Note that you should require they be specific: “I search the wall really carefully for a secret door” is covered by the roll their character gets for ten minutes of searching a 10 foot stretch of wall (using OD&D as an example). It needs to be something more concrete than that, something such that if somebody really was trying what they suggest it would be strange if they didn’t find it. If there’s a book that when lifted opens the secret door behind the bookcase and they say they take out and examine all the books, that ought to open the bookcase. This puts the onus on the Judge to make sure that for every secret door and hidden thing, there really is a specific way that it works and the Judge either knows it in advance or makes it up when the player starts searching. No fair having a door that’s generically secret, and opens when you “figure out its secret”. Make up whether it’s opened by sliding, or pushing a particular stone on the wall, or lifting a torch out of a sconce, or whatever, but know what it is so you can rule whether what the player is doing will work.

Ok, let them find the specific thing they’re looking for as a gimme, but what about applying a penalty to the roll for finding anything else?

No, that’s even worse. Conceptually it might make some sense that focusing on one thing makes it less likely to spot other things, but that means a priori the player is making an uninformed choice between having a flat roll for everything or a roll with a penalty for everything but one thing. It just doesn’t make sense to take that bargain, so it discourages players from getting specific about what they’re looking for. The goal is to encourage players to go beyond “I roll my Search skill” and put some real thought into it: the way to do that is make sure they’re never worse off for having tried.

What do you mean by no pixel-bitching?

Pixel-bitching is when in a video game it’s not just enough to click on a wall, you have to click on the exact right pixel out of hundreds on the wall, so you just have to keep moving the pointer tiny increments and trying again. In tabletop RPGs that means making the players guess the exact right thing instead of just anything that would work if it were a physical problem. For instance, if the chest is guarded by a trap that’s set off by a trip-wire right in front of the chest and the player says “I look for a pressure plate in front of the chest” it’s pixel-bitching to tell them “You don’t see a pressure plate” without mentioning the trip-wire that’s right there. Obviously if the character’s getting right down there and looking at the floor trying to spot a pressure plate or switch then they’re going to see the trip-wire in front of their face.

When they say they’re looking in a particular place or via a particular method, and the Judge should reveal to them whatever they would discover in that place by that method. It’s legitimate to ask for some more details if you’re not completely sure what they’re doing and what it would reveal (“Are you getting down with your face close to the flagstone to take a look? Or are you poking at it with your pole? Or something else?”) If there’s some ambiguity, give them the benefit of the doubt. If they’re pushing on the flagstone with their ten-foot pole to try to set off any pressure-plate traps, and it’s not clear whether the pole would necessarily touch the trip-wire that the Judge knows is there… just rule the pole does touch the trip-wire. They were looking in the right place for something that was there with a method that could plausibly reveal it, so reward their skill. Otherwise you risk teaching them that adding specificity in how they’re searching is an often fruitless game of “what number am I thinking of?” when it should be an opportunity to interact with the world to gain success where the straight dice-roll failed them.

Tales of the Rambling Bumblers

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