Tag: game design

…Ah, but what if you’ve got to kill a dragon and there’re no 8th-level warriors in the party and you’re totally willing to sacrifice yourself heroically? Good question! I’m doing away with the rules for subduing a dragon (duh) and instead instituting something I like to call “Going for the Kill!” One PC of the party can draw the dragon’s attention and ire and get all close-and-personal…as opposed to dancing around hoping to hit the jackpot roll while avoiding dragon breath. When you “Go for the Kill!” you receive a +5 bonus to your attack roll….

Going for the kill is not all wine and roses, however. By (pretty much) challenging the dragon to single-combat and getting in close, you will be subjected to dragon fire. That means no “rollover save” to avoid the flames…the PC isn’t trying to avoid the flames, she’s trying to deliver a death blow. The mechanic works like this: you must announce you’re “going for the kill” before rolling initiative. If you lose initiative, or if you miss your attack roll, then your character is bacon…or, at least, mortally wounded (I believe I mentioned before a little resource called “grit?” It allows characters to fight on after being mortally wounded, which means you can see a Beowulf or Sir Orrin type combat, where the hero still slays the dragon despite being slain himself). It’s tough…but that’s the price you pay to be a hero.

— Chop! Dragon Breath (Part 4) – B/X BLACKRAZOR

Author’s emphases.

The dice only exist to give players a chance to fail at something. The dice do not allow you to do things, you do that yourself when you declare your action. Rolling dice only gives a chance of hindering the players, not helping.

D&D is at its core, a dice game in which you declare your action and then roll dice to see if you fail. If you don’t, then you continue onward to gain power and glory.

— The Dice are Not Your Friend – Farooq’s Gaming Blog

Author’s emphasis. Alas, that blog is gone, and the Internet Archive does not have a copy of it.

The blogpost Why A Soldier Is A Rogue Not A Fighter is a great example of thinking about character classes in new ways. It focuses on 5th Edition D&D, but it inspired me to ponder the concept in earlier (and OSR) editions.

One detail repeatedly stood out: Rogues (I do prefer that class name change) are not proficient with shields. While a soldier-Rogue wielding a (two-handed) polearm would not need it, a shield is all the more valuable when one is wearing only light armor. It should be there.

Then it hit me. If I rephrase “not proficient with shields” as “gains no benefit from using a shield,” the dissonance between mechanics and aesthetics disappears. We so often let the game mechanics alter our roleplay; e.g., if your character gains no mechanical benefit from using a shield, you would have them stop using one. But how would they know, in-character, as inexperienced soldiers? If a shield was available, and they were not wielding a two-handed weapon, they would certainly use it.

I am presuming a 1st-level Rogue here as that is what a unit of village militia would consist of. Higher level Rogues could recognize the non-benefit and/or learn how to benefit (i.e., be given proficiency).

A D&D/d20 mechanic that is all-but-universal is some kind of attack improvement when wielding a weapon in each hand.

I find that to be the complete opposite of the primary—and, in my opinion, obvious—reason for the choice: giving you something else to parry/deflect enemy attacks with. I see no benefit to you when attacking; if you make an attack with the off-hand weapon, you are going to be parrying with the main-. A momentary swap, not an addition.

There is no functional difference between sword-and-dagger and sword-and-shield. That swap likewise works with a shield; I bash or swat you with my shield, but my weapon’s role becomes protection for that moment.

A modern D&D mechanic I agree with is the +2 defense bonus granted by a shield. This leaves space to grant a +1 defense bonus to an off-hand weapon. The difference being size of my off-hand tool.

Instead of providing a bonus to the attack and damage rolls, magical weapons in Chainmail grant additional attack rolls per round. Conversely, magical armor negates a number of attacks per round.

The part that makes this feel properly magical is that an opponent can be reduced to zero attacks, and thus incapable of harming the wearer.

This can be used in Dungeons & Dragons almost as-is. The only question is whether the attack negation by armor is per round or per opponent. As magical weapons would only grant additional attacks per round, the complimentary rule for armor would be attack negation per round. But the magical bonus on Armor Class normally applies against every attack. If the attack negation is per opponent, a wearer could simply be invulnerable against a horde of low-level opponents.

Chainmail has a solution for this: opponents can utilize tactical teamwork which combines their number of attacks. This is superior to D&D mechanics like Help Action and Pack Tactics which would be insufficient against a per-opponent ruling.

If D&D Hit Points are not simply meat points but also luck, grit, et. al. (which I believe), then weapon damage needs to also scale by level.

Why should a duel between two high-level fighters take much longer than one between two lowers?

I see three options (for fighters):

1. Weapon damage bonus of +1 per fighter level. No change to number of attacks.
2. Weapon damage is one die per fighter level. No change to number of attacks.
3. One attack roll per fighter level. No change to weapon damage.

Clerics had to wait for the AD&D Second Edition supplemental rulebook Player’s Options: Spells & Magic for cantrips, there named orisons.

In both editions of AD&D, Cantrip/Orison was a first-level spell. That was the cost for them. A first-level caster got four cantrips for the expenditure of a first-level spell. Thus the three grades of zero-level magic-user granting use of 1, 2, and 3 cantrips per day. This can easily be mirrored for clerics.

As you may have guessed, my musing on zero-level magic-users is based upon Old School concepts. These are appropriate cantrips (again, from AD&D’s Unearthed Arcana):

I concur with Aaron the Pedantic that Attack Cantrips Are The Worst. I do like modern systems’ inclusion of ritual casting. A practical definition of spell slots is the special preparations for when you need to cast a spell in a time-constrained situation. Every spell should be castable via multi-minute ritual—perhaps even attack spells. Being able to throw a Fireball or Lightning Bolt at a castle every 10 minutes is not that far from gunpowder siege cannon.

As is all-too-normal these days, two Web searches on the identical keywords yielded different results. My search for “zero-level magic-users” before I posted Part 1 did not surface their mention in AD&D’s Unearthed Arcana rulebook. Here it is:

I do not remember this passage at all. I only remember zero-level options for the Cavalier class; also in Unearthed Arcana, but it was included in the original Dragon Magazine #72 article on the class.

It is very close to what I was thinking.

In older editions of Dungeons & Dragons, there was the concept of a zero-level Fighter: not as good as a 1st-level adventurer, but better than Normal Men (also a term from older editions).

I got daydreaming about zero-level equivalents for magic-users, clerics, and rogues. People with perhaps insufficient potential to ever advance to 1st level but potential, nonetheless.

But what could they do that Norman Men could not? Something I want to explore via microblogging, here. So more to come.

TL;DR: -2 AC penalty.

As I revealed in my storyline, Elmö’s Obligation, Xenograg has a taboo that his head must be bare to perform sorcery. Obviously, this includes helmets. So I have always been curious about how Dungeon & Dragons Armor Class (AC) is/should be adjusted when a combatant is sans helmet.

I never agreed with Advanced D&D’s no-called-shots-except-in-the-case-of-bare-heads rule. This is literally not exceptional enough of a case.

The house rule I have seen most often is a -1 AC penalty. It is one I have used, but it feels insufficient.

Then the answer came to me while I was thinking about the difference between a (chain) mail shirt, which is medium armor in D&D, and (chain) mail armor, which is heavy armor. What is the difference?

How much of the body is covered by the armor.

Therefore, foregoing head protection lowers your Armor Class one category. In Old School D&D clones, this equates to a -2 penalty.

It is the simple elegance and clarity of the explanation that tells me this is the correct answer.

My first edition of Dungeons & Dragons was the 1981 Moldvay Basic but I quickly fell victim to Gygax’s marketing of Advanced D&D. It was years before my brother and I found anyone else who had the game, so all I had was the TSR products as-written. The 1983 World of Greyhawk boxed set was the one and only campaign world, then. The encounter tables in the Glossography became unforgettable as they set the bar for NPC experience levels. The entry for “Men, Patrol, Knights” is the best example of this:

Ignore the high-level officers. The average knight is at least a 4th-level Fighter. His squire is 2nd- or 3rd-level. Even the serjeants are 1st-level Fighters, which is meaningful as AD&D has the concept of “zero-level” for commoners a little better at combat (e.g. militiamen) than the rest. Other entries in those tables have similar experience level distributions.

Regardless of rules edition, these are high levels for average warriors. Knights are elite professionals, true, but all of them in (what 5th-edition D&D calls) Tier 2? D&D presumes that all character classes will be present in equivalent distributions, so Tier 2 spell-casters will also be common. Porting these levels as-is into 5e would not change my point at all. One of my many quibbles with 5e is its continued power inflation from 3e. Even more than with character classes, I disagree with Knights being 8d8+16 HD opponents and peasants having 16 Hit Points.

This has a huge impact upon the rest of a campaign world. How many of us have carried these assumptions into our own custom worlds? It has taken me years (decades!) to truly see that knights, for one, can still be feared killing machines at lower experience levels. That even comes with a bonus: they also become mortal, which every non-hero should be. If you are keeping the spell-caster equivalency, this also lowers the magical power level of your world—a very good thing, in my opinion.

In 5e terms, I see a squire as a 1st-level Fighter. An average knight would only be a 2nd-level Fighter. Higher levels are still available for experienced knights, of course. Against peasants and militiamen, a 2nd-level Fighter is a sufficient killer but is also at risk of being slain by a few enemies working together.

For further discussion on this topic, I highly recommend JB’s (B/X BLACKRAZOR) blogposts Hit Me Baby One More Time, 1st Level Magic-Users, and One Man Army.

A Mage or Cleric of any rank above Apprentice will always be able to do magic better than a Warrior or Thief or Assassin of equal experience points and equal Psi Potential, simply because the non-Mages and non-Clerics are amateurs—not because they are some sort of psychic cripples.

— Authentic Thaumaturgy, p. 25

Author’s emphasis.

The Champawat Tiger killed, as far as anyone was able to record, 436 human beings in her lifetime. Mostly they were women and children, gone out into the forest to collect firewood or livestock fodder. She killed strategically, never hitting the same location twice and constantly staying on the move.

By any stretch of the imagination that is more than enough to call her a monster. It’s a perfectly fair assessment, and the leap of faith to ascribe it supernatural power would be quite small, given the circumstances. It’s as close to a true monster as you’re liable to get.

When the tiger finally died at the hands of Jim Corbett, the body revealed a different story: The two canine teeth on the right side of her jaw had been broken by a hunter’s bullet some 8 years before.

The Champawat Tiger was starving.

The damage to her teeth meant that she was unable to hunt her normal prey, and given the long-term pressure of habitat loss she would have been hard-up to find sufficient food in the first place. The killings were acts of desperation, brought upon by circumstances that made life as a normal tiger impossible. Perhaps it’s still right to call her a monster, but she was not a monster because she was born with some innate malice—she was only a very large cat getting on in years, desperate for food.

Jim Corbett was called upon to hunt down another fifty maneaters over the course of the next 35 years. Together, those tigers had killed over 2000 people, for much the same reasons as the Champawat Tiger—injury, desperation, starvation, and habitat loss.

Would you look at that.

The root cause was British colonialism.

436 people dead because some dumb shit went trophy hunting, because he just had to prove how big and strong his penis was to all his dumb shit friends….

Monsters have a cause.

That is the lesson of the Champawat Tiger.

Monsters are made to be so.

— D&D Doesn’t Understand What Monsters Are – Throne of Salt

Author’s emphases.

So, you’re playing D&D and you’re fighting some orcs. All the orcs are armed with feather dusters, so they [are] actually incapable of harming anyone. And your DM doesn’t give [experience points] for combat, so they’ll yield [zero XP] upon death.

This combat is a waste of time. You’re just rolling dice until the orcs die.

The encounter is shit because the encounter has no impact.

Impact: the ability to permanently change the game. The opposite of impact is fluff.

…

— Impact – Goblin Punch

Author’s emphasis.

8. “Race you can’t win rule.” The game’s monster difficulty should increase slightly faster than the advancement of the [character], given average stats and default equipment, so as to force him to rely upon items and tactics.

The reasoning here is that if the player doesn’t have to rely on randomly-found stuff then [that stuff becomes] unimportant to play. However, if it’s required to have specific items to be successful then many games will be outright unwinnable. The balance between these two poles is what makes random dungeon generation difficult, but it’s also part of what makes random dungeon gameplay interesting….

— @Play: The Eight Rules of Roguelike Design – GameSetWatch

Thank the gods for the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, else I could not have linked to the source blogpost.