I Need A Miracle
Posted by Joshua on Apr 27, 2009
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.
Tunnels & Trolls 5.5 vs 7.5
Posted by Joshua on Mar 19, 2009
An overview of the changes that I’ve noticed between T&T v5.5 and v7.5 All the comparisons phrased in terms of what 5.5 has/lacks vs. 7.5, since I read 7.5 first and went over it extensively. Also, some of the changes in 7.5 appeared in 5.5 in a couple-page appendix of Ken St. Andre’s house rules:
Chargen
- No WIZ stat, spells are powered by STR. Advantage: 7.5 STR to power spells isn’t a deal-breaker, but it makes the archetype of the frail old but nonetheless mighty wizard a problem.
- SPD is an optional stat only used for movement rates, which are fairly complicated. It can’t be increased. Advantage: 7.5 Even if you view Speed strictly in terms of how fast you can run, that’s certainly something you can improve with training, at least as much as you can improve your Intelligence or Charisma.
- No Triples Add and Roll Over. Advantage: 7.5 Not a big deal, but it’s kind of cool. (This is one of the KsA houserules.)
- Weight Possible and Weight Carried emphasized more in 5.5 including rules for how long you can carry how much. Advantage: 7.5 I’m not enough of a Grognard to value the added bookkeeping. It’s good to have a rule-of-thumb, but I don’t like tracking it.
- No Specialists or Citizens. Advantage: 7.5 Anything that increases the number of viable archetypes without unduly burdening the system with complexity is a win in my book
- Warriors don’t get Level adds in Combat Adds. Advantage: 7.5 Something besides the armor bonus as a reward for leveling up is nice to have.
- Warrior-Wizards instead of Paragons. Toss-up. It’s harder to be a Paragon (you need a triple somewhere in your roll-up, not just everything >=12), but the 7.5 advantages are better: they get to double their armor instead of add 1, they get to invent new spells once they reach 10th level, the Wizard’s Guild will sell them spells. Both versions are rare enough that I doubt it matters which you use.
- No Talents. Advantage: 7.5. I like Talents…maybe the most out of any skill system I’ve seen published.
Saving Rolls
- Saving Rolls have a minimum for success of 5, and are calculated as the SR – Luck = number to beat (instead of roll +Luck > SR?). Advantage: 7.5 The mechanical result is the same, but roll+add is easier for most people; whether it’s better to have 3 is an automatic failure or <=5 is a toss-up, but I’d personally give the edge to the players succeeding more often.
Combat
- Monster dice as well as adds get reduced as Monster Rating goes down during combat; this produces a much sharper death-spiral effect. Advantage: 7.5 I don’t really see any advantage to having nearly every combat the PCs win end with several anti-climactic rounds that are rolled (if at all) just to see how fast they can finish.
- 5.5 Makes it clear that armor doesn’t subtract from hits for magic (though a magic amulet might). Advantage: 5.5
- Missile fire isn’t added into the side’s Total Hits, but some magic is–at least up until the point when it would double-count hits. Advantage: 7.5 This rule actually puzzles me in 5.5. If you’re worried about double-counting damage, why does magic get to (semi) double-count and not missiles? There’s a sort of explanation that Take That You Fiend! jars or shocks nearby foes and makes them less effective, reducing their attack up until it makes them lose the round but never delivering more hits than the magic’s damage, but Freeze Please and Blasting Power are spread out, while other spells don’t, and…It’s far simpler to my mind to just add everything up, and that lets your rear-rank guys like archers and wizards actually figure into whether you win or lose the round. The whole “the monster can lose the combat because of magic adds, but not take extra damage” calculation makes my eyes water.
- Damage is divided evenly between all the losing side, except that if it doesn’t come out evenly the Wizard (if any) can take the smaller parcel. Advantage: 7.5 Dividing the damage up is one of the few tactical decisions that the party gets to make during a turn, and I like the idea that the fighters can choose to bear the brunt of it and protect the weaker party members. I can see play-by-post going with even splits to reduce the back-and-forth, but flavor-wise I think 7.5 is much more interesting.
- Missile weapon fire requires multiplying a distance factor by a size factor to get the SR level, but archers get twice the DEX adds when firing a bow. Advantage: 7.5
- Dodging is handled by an SR against Luck if the players agree that monsters get the same SR. Advantage: 7.5. There are several points in 5.5 where the rule to be used is negotiated with the players, which I kind of like, but the 7.5 version of just doubling the SR level if the target is dodging or moving erratically is easier and quicker.
- No spite damage. Advantage: 7.5 Even a stronger party bears some risk of injury in combat, and combats tend to get resolved faster because spite damage bypasses armor.
- Rules for too-heavy weapons. Advantage: 7.5 While it’s nice that 5.5 has an answer to what happens if you try to wield a weapon too big for you, the answer being that you knock yourself out in short order (your STR is damaged by the difference each round, with it increasing each round as your new STR is even less) is probably worse than just saying you can’t use it effectively.
- Rules for Movement. Advantage: 7.5 The 5.5 rules are simultaneously complex, with varying formulas based on encumbrance and type of activity (looking carefully, normal dungeon speed, sprinting) and fatigue rules based on CON and abstract, yielding nothing more than a rating of feet/minute traveled.
Monsters
- No special abilities for monsters. Advantage: 7.5 The whole spite-damage activates special monster abilities like stoning gaze or fiery breath makes them a lot less bland, IMO.
- Wandering monsters. Advantage: 5.5 5.5′s rules are vague, but at least it has some.
- Monster reaction chart. Advantage: 5.5 Another inexplicable hole in 7.5 is no discussion at all of anything monsters might do except attack and fight to the death.
Magic
- No Kremm resistance. Toss-up. I don’t really know whether the whole kremm resistance thing is worthwhile, and I suspect I won’t until I’ve played a bunch.
There’s more, including stuff on learning languages, berserk fighting, a really elaborate set of optional marksmanship rules, hirelings and slaves, some nice discussion of designing a dungeon, and so forth, but that’s the gist of it. There’s also a fairly substantial (and controversial) change in how experience is allotted, going from advancement in level granting you the right to improve one attribute by an attribute-specific formula (e.g. +your new level to your STR, but only 1/2 your level rounded down if added to your DEX) to a uniform spend your current attribute x 10 xp to raise it by one, with level back-figured from changes to one of your class’ primary attributes, but I haven’t yet bothered to figure out what that would mean for a typical character at various levels. I suspect 5.5 would tend to preserve initial differences in stats more, since you can only pick one stat to advance per level, and levels take more and more XP to achieve as you advance.
As you can tell, by and large I think V7.5 is an improvement in most ways. I think 5.5 is a better introduction to RPGs…I’m not sure somebody new to RPGs could really understand what to do with 7.5, and certain things are either cryptic or accidentally ommitted in 7.5 (such as what the 2nd figure for DEX under DEX required for knives meant), but most of the individual rules changes in 7.5 are in the direction of making things simpler and more uniform, and where they add complication (Talents, Specialists) they get a lot of bang for the buck. Still, I’m very pleased to have both sets of rules now, and I like T&T even more for having read where it is coming from.
update: Commenter G’Noll points out that I was confusing the requirements for Paragon with the other Specialists; Paragons in 7.5 have the same basic requirements as in 5.5: 12+ in every attribute before Kindred modifiers are applied, though that’s much harder to do with an extra two attributes.
4e For Grognards?
Posted by Joshua on Mar 18, 2009
The Core Mechanics offers up 10 House Rules to Make Grognards Like 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. Unfortunately, most of the house rules are of the Racing Stripes on a Yugo variety. (Or, if you’re a 4e fan, putting Fuzzy Dice and lowrider hydraulics on a Formula 1.) Except for Rule 7 (Don’t scale the Campaign Setting), they change the surface details like number of classes or races without getting at the essence of the play style. For instance, Rule 4: Limit Races to 3. White Box D&D from 1974 had the rule
There is no reason that players cannot be allowed to play as virtually anything, provided they begin relatively weak and work up to the top, i.e., a player wishing to be a Dragon would have to begin as let us say, a “young” one and progress upwards in the usual manner, steps being predetermined by the campaign referee.
So it’s not the Dragonborn that are keeping the Grognards away, ok? (Btw, just for comparison, that single rule is the same amount of space as devoted to Halflings, and only about a sentence or two shorter than the rules for Elves or Dwarves.)
So what would you really have to do to make 4e Grognard-friendly, assuming you wanted to? There are really three major things, and they’re comparatively simple, but profound.
First, you have to reverse the direction of causality in the system: cause and effect have to flow from the game-world to the rules, not from the rules to the game-world as it currently stands. What does that really mean for 4e? It means that you have to visualize what’s really going on in the world, and reason out the consequences from there. What 4e calls “the flavor text” is the power. You can’t just invoke “Tide of Iron” and move the mini, it actually has to make game-world sense that the character be able to push the opponent in that direction given everything you know about the combatants such as their relative mass, whether one of them is made of some substance that makes pushing/being pushed wierd or would have some other consequence–think about using your shield to shove a Gelatinous Cube around and you’ll see what I mean. And if the effect is not supposed to be magical, if you can’t explain how it would actually happen (frankly, most of the pull and slide powers) then you can’t do it. If the flavor text of the power causes small flames, that’s different from a power that creates icicles, even if the rules are otherwise identical. And just because two powers have rules that interact (the whole “exception-based design”) means nothing if it’s not clear how the interaction would play out/make any sense in the game-world. I expect that a lot of 4e players would balk at this, despite it being the same as Mike Mearls’ advice on running 4e without minis, but do you want to game with Grognards or don’t you?
The second thing you have to do is eliminate any vestiges of any rule or mechanic that can’t be understood in game world terms, and talked about in-character. That doesn’t mean that the characters have to use the exact same terms, but they have to be able to think about the concept. A Fighting Man might not actually say “Saving Throw”, but he could fully understand and discuss with the other characters that he’s much better at dodging a death ray or beam from a magic wand than he is at resisting a spell. He can talk about how hard it is to hurt or kill something, even if he doesn’t literally say AC or HP, and how experienced he is even if he doesn’t divide it into points of XP. For 4e that means dropping Skill Challenges. Sorry, but there’s no in-game way I can conceive of to explain the spooky action at a distance implied by the accumulating successes and failures (particularly the failures). You’re just going to have to do it the old-fashioned way, by reasoning about the logical consequences of each individual failure and success and whether there’s any causal reason one would influence the next. You also have to eliminate Action Points, possibly Healing Surges, and probably a raft of other things (“minions” for instance–a creature of the same type as another you’re fighting that can only take 1/100th or less damage can really put a dent in the old verisimilitude). You could try to “reify” them…make them actual things that the game-world inhabitants really do understand and talk about (perhaps with magical or divine explanations), but you risk turning your game into The Order of the Stick.
The final thing that you have to do, and this is really the culmination of the other two, is that you have to stop looking at the character sheet and the rulebooks to tell you whether you’re permitted to do something. If the player can describe the action in such a way that it makes a lick of sense in the game-world, the character can attempt it. The GM can assign a probability to whether it works (even if it’s so low as to be in effect impossible), or just rule directly, but everybody can attempt anything they can imagine unless it’s specifically called out as forbidden to their class (e.g. fighters learning spells, magic users wearing armor). Skills, feats, powers…they mean you’ve got a better shot, but the lack of one should never be cause for the GM to say no.
And that’s it. You don’t have to strip out the laughable names “Moon Prism Power Divine Strike!™” “Bloody-Riptooth All Cool And Spiky Badass MoFo Crocodile™.” You don’t have to put save-or-die effects in, enforce completely random chargen, have level-draining undead, or make magic Vancian. All of those things were indeed common enough back in the day…but they weren’t the essence of game-play; plenty of undeniably old-school games didn’t have those features….even if they were using a system that did (3d6 in order was one of the first things that many groups discarded; by the time of Basic D&D there were official, if optional, rules for discarding characters with no score above 9, or swapping attributes). You could add one or more of those, but the plain truth is that the Grognards who would insist on them aren’t likely to touch even a revamped 4e with the proverbial 10′ pole, and those are the things that 4e players are most likely to strongly object to. On the other side, I think that many of the things that are show-stoppers for the Grognards literally fall beneath the 4e fans’ notice….in prior conversations trying to explain the differences I get the distinct impression that they don’t even realize (and some don’t believe) that these actually are differences between the way the editions work, or they discuss them solely in terms of design goals (this is faster, everything you need to know is written on this card) without even considering whether it has implications for how you think about the world.
So on the one hand, I do actually think a 4e for Grognards is possible…in some sense even easy: just ignore a bunch of these rules, and interpret these ones in a different light. On the other, I’m not entirely sure whether the result would be still be 4e.
Multi-Classing
Posted by Joshua on Mar 13, 2009
The Valley of the Blue Snails, a really interesting blog mostly about an unusual setting that Canecorpus has created, has a post about Multi-Classing in his D&D setting:
Valley of Blue Snails: Multi-Classes Revisited
I will be changing a few of the multi-class titles though I’m a bit mixed on what direction to take it. The titles are similar to normal class titles (Veteran, Cutpurse, Wizard, etc) in that they are mostly for fluff with perhaps a minor ability to adhere the two classes better. I’m deciding on wither to make it very setting specific or use more intuitive titles.
Example, a Fighter-Cleric would be a Paladin. Pretty intuitive. Setting specific would be something like a Dwarven Fighter-Cleric would be a Whitebeard. Not so intuitive but perhaps a better choice since this sort of multi-class fluff is well outside of the realm of B/X anyhow. The main problem is the setting specifics titles would indeed be rather specific, slanting towards race with specific classes.
I did something similar for a (for now abandoned) retro game I was working on, which I might as well share in case somebody finds it interesting:
| Primary/Secondary | Fighter | Mage | Priest | Thief | Actor | Ranger |
| Fighter | Warrior | Magic Knight | Paladin | Brigand | Swashbuckler | Barbarian |
| Mage | Wizard | Mage | Seer | Warlock | Witch | Hermit |
| Priest | Monk | Thaumaturge | Priest | Charlatan | Oracle | Druid |
| Thief | Rogue | Mountebank | Fraud | Thief | Spy | Outlaw |
| Actor | Bard | Conjurer | Idol | Jester | Actor | Minstrel |
| Ranger | Scout | Shaman | Pilgrim | Vagabond | Emissary | Ranger |
Basically, there are six primary classes (one for each of the six standard stats) and they combine into 36 different classes, with differing emphasis depending on whether a particular class is primary or secondary. Somebody who’s primarily a Thief but uses magic to steal and con is a Mountebank, while somebody who is primarily a Mage, but uses stealth and deception to accomplish his ends and impress people with his power is a Charlatan, etc. You mostly got the armor restrictions of your primary class, and the weapon restrictions of your secondary class, with most other abilities splitting the difference. Spell user progressed as in their primary as if they were one level lower, and their secondary two levels lower. And so forth.
I actually think it’s pretty workable, but it’s not something my main face-to-face play group would be interested in, and I have too much on my plate right now to pursue it further. If I start a play-by-forum or play-by-post campaign, I’ll probably use Tunnels & Trolls instead of trying to sell people on and play-test some wacky homebrew.
Tunnels & Trolls: Magic
Posted by Joshua on Mar 10, 2009
Magic in Tunnels & Trolls is a fairly standard (though innovative back in ’76) system of individual spells that cost spell-points to cast. In earlier editions, your spell-points were your STR, now they’re your WIZ, which seems to me widen the range of possible character types quite a bit. The names of the spells are whimsical, like “Take That You Fiend!” (the basic magic blast spell), “Dis-Spell”, “Oh, Go Away!”, which some people find a bit off-putting, but the spell effects are generally straightforward: do damage, turn invisible, heal wounds, and so forth. Not always: “Troll God’s Blessing” causes a big club to appear over the head of the target and bash it, but if that kind of thing is a problem for your players you can easily substitute more “serious” flavor text. Spells range in level from 1 to 13 (or more, I suppose, but that’s as far as the books go). Wizards begin with all the standard 1st level spells, and learn new spells from the Wizard’s Guild, by paying 1000 GP per level of spell. Spells can only be taught by direct instruction (presumably by casting the first level Teacher spell until the Wizard succeeds at the SR to impress it in his mind). Casting a spell requires a Saving Roll against the level of the spell, which should mostly be a “gimme” except for very low level casters or when trying to cast a spell at a higher level than you’ve reached.
That brings up an unusual feature of T&T magic. While spells have a minimum DEX and INT to cast, they aren’t restricted by the level of the caster. A 1st level Wizard can attempt to cast a higher level spell, it just requires a harder Saving Roll and higher stat minimums. A 1st level spell requires 10 INT and DEX, a 2nd level 12, all the way up to 100 for a 13th level spell. Many spells can also be cast at higher level than their minimum in order to ramp up their effects, e.g. Take That You Fiend! costs 6 WIZ and does damage equal to the caster’s INT at 1st level. If a Wizard with INT 15 casts it as a 2nd level spell, it costs 12 WIZ but does 30 points of damage, as a 3rd level spell it costs 18 WIZ but does 60 points of damage, etc. Whether a spell can be “Powered Up” and the effects of doing so vary depending on the spell.
Spell costs can be reduced in a variety of ways. If you’re higher level than the spell you’re casting you get a discount, with a bigger discount the higher level you are compared to the spell level, though there’s a minimum cost of 1. You also get a discount for using a “focus” such as a wand or ring. In fact, the primary purpose of wands and staves in T&T is as spell foci rather than bearers of independent spell effects. Specialist Wizards get to cast all the spells in their specialty at half cost, but can’t cast spells outside their specialty at all. WIZ recovers fairly quickly, 1 point per ten minutes of non-strenuous activity (no combat or running, but you don’t need a lie-down), but high-level spell can still take hours to recover from casting since they can cost 30, 40, 50, even 200 points to cast (for the 13th level “Born Again” spell).
An even more unusual feature, and one that’s apparently new and somewhat controversial, is that spells cannot be directly cast on any target with a current WIZ higher than the caster’s. That means that not only are Wizards unable to affect more powerful wizards (at least until their targets have expended enough WIZ to make them weaker), but Wizards may find themselves unable to bespell Warriors and monsters if they have built up their WIZ. Monsters typically have WIZ equal to 1/10 of their monster rating, so a dragon with MR 500 has quite a substantial barrier against direct-effect spells. Wizards who attempt to cast against a target with higher WIZ get a “bad feeling” that lets them stop before they actually waste any of their own WIZ.
I’m not entirely sure what I think of this. On the one hand, I certainly see roleplaying possibilities, particularly since spells that indirectly affect the target (e.g. its clothes, or by affecting the ground under it, or drop something on it) are possible regardless of differences in WIZ. It also gives magic a very otherworldly feel, not at all equivalent to simply having a laser pistol or even crossbow. On the other hand, since WIZ amounts vary round by round in combat based on the spells the magic users are casting, it might become something of a pain to track, and even if it didn’t you could potentially lose a lot of actions to “bad feelings” when your estimates of the current WIZ of your opponent miss the mark. On the third hand, it adds another tactical dimension when unleashing a huge spell at the beginning of combat can render you vulnerable to lesser magicians for the rest of the combat, and I’m in favor of increasing the number of tactical decisions, at least in moderation. As with other things T&T, I really have to see how it plays out in practice.