4:30 am Musings

If I was to populate a river near Ancient Rome with great whites and rented Evel Knievel's motorcyle for a weekend, could I theoretically cross the Rubicon while jumping the shark? 

Because, to be honest, while not a fan of AI art, this seems like the only reason it should exist. The collective creative energy of all of humanity is the only thing worthy of generating such an image.

On a complely related note, I got an idea at about 4:30 am.

What if I went full-on narrative and did to the other foundational pieces of the game what I already did to alignment - replace structure with language. Instead of lawful good, you are now noble... or faithful... or stoic. They're all flavors of how you're interpreting lawful good for your character, but they do the same thing - they guide your roleplaying choices.

Because that's what it's about. Now...

- What if instead of a class, you had a role - and that could be anything?

- And what if instead of a species, you had an origin - that, again, could be anything? 

- And then, while we're at it, let's kind of get rid of attributes altogether, eh?

Let's call it the Samewise Gamgee approach. Because, I wanna play me some Sam. That's my jam. But I've never (ever) been able to create a set of rules that truly lets me play as Samwise. I mean, he's a hobbit gardner for goodness' sake. How the F-itty-F do you play a hobbit gardner?

Easy. You play a hobbit gardner. Rather, you play a faithful hobbit gardner. Whose starting weapon is a frying pan.

I'm going to get working on 'version 3' of Hack'D & Slash'D. See you in a bit with an update.

More Philosophical Shifting

In the ongoing effort to streamline, simplify, and clarify the rules for Hack'D & Slash'D, I've reversed course on a few things I've recently argued in favor of... the most recent update to the rules (which as of this moment is only done through the rules on Common Spells on page 19) includes these changes:

- I've ditched the rules for multi-classing, and instead inserted several options to make characters more flexible within their existing classes. This was prompted by the problems that I was starting to run into with levels... if you are a mystic 3 with arcane 2/light 1, what is your caster level, exactly? Yeah. That's what I thought. Now, you have a way to make mystics more versatile casters, to add a little bit of casting to the warrior and rogue, and to increase your diversity as you advance. Adding tags at levels 3 and 5 means that you can now be a warrior caster at 1 (but you'll be a relatively vanilla warrior), or add the casting later in your career. This allows you to become the traditional D+D cleric pretty easily: warrior with conjuring tag and light magic. Bingo. You can go more traditional paladin approach (add that caster tag at level 3), or wait until level 5, and use it to round your character out at the end of your career. Rogues can now be bards with relative ease, and mystics can end up picking up several fields over time and becoming quite diverse. All of this feels better.

- I totally overhauled rules for mana. Instead of mana being a separate check, it's now embedded in the original check to cast a spell. All spells require a check, and you only lose mana on a bad failure; the more challenging the spell, the more likely you lose a mana point. If you fail with a 4, you lose a mana point if the spell was rank 4 or higher. There's going to be a crossover where by level 6, you only fail on a roll of 4 or lower, so you're insulated a bit from losing mana on a 5 or 6... since a 5 on the die is going to be a success by the time it matters. The rules for mana have gone through a tremendous evolution over the last few months. 

I pulled xp scaling wayyyy back. There was no reason for numbers to be as big as they were (except B/X hanging over the game still). 1 xp now means something. I'm toying with the idea of awarding xp based on the level of the foe, modified by the difference between the heroes and the foe... but then you have to factor in the number of heroes. It might be easy enough to go with something like this; a creature is worth xp equal to its level. 1-2 creatures = that level; 3-5 creatures = +1 level; 6-10 creatures = +2 levels. Add or subtract the difference between equivalent levels. A level 1 hero vs. a level 1 monster earns 1 xp (same level, level 1 foe). A group of 4 level 4 heroes against 1-2 level 5 monsters each earns 5 xp (same equivalent level defeating level 5 foe). At level 2+, defeating a solo level 1 creature solo is not worth any xp, because it's too easy... but 3-5 of those creatures grants you 2 xp. Still tinkering with these ideas. 

Meditations and Revelations

In Chris Farley SNL interviewer voice:

Remember when I blogged about being almost done with the core mechanics for Hack’D & Slash’D? Yeah. That was AWESOME.

Ahem.

A full disclosure before I continue. I like writing games and designing games as much as, and sometimes more than (gasp) playing games. Designing games often IS the game for me.

The old cliches are things like the journey is the reward, getting there is half the fun, and I’m more about process than product. And, yes, those are largely the excuses of people who don’t know how to get stuff done and push through to the finish line and actually put a bow on the dang thing already, but they can also be true and end up being my jam.

All of that is a roundabout way of saying I’m re-examining some basic game mechanics again. I would tell you how I got here, but I’m not sure, and it’s a deep rabbit hole that starts with staging musicals (which it turns out I’m going to be doing again! Hurray!), goes to using pentagons and stars as a foundational shape in the production design, the idea that the dodecahedron (which I have dedicated my current role-playing life to) is the greatest of all the dice - and I will FIGHT you - and then to how you look at the die from different angles and the appearance changes.

Anyhow.

It SOMEHOW got me thinking about the very concept that ‘half damage’ is a holdover from saving throws and fireballs and dragon breath. You either take full damage from a fireball, or half damage from a fireball. It’s a mechanic that is simple and elegant, and it makes a lot of sense. It is linked to the idea that on a ‘critical hit’ you deal ‘double damage’. I’ve just assumed that is true since I was ten. Because it is the LAW.

But for my game, because so many numbers are fixed, these fundamental beliefs were really limiting nuance. I needed more nuance somewhere. 

I was trying to get that nuance in slicing the results; you could take half damage, or quarter damage… or you could take -3 damage, or maybe -6 damage.

But… it was numbers. Numbers to remember.

I don’t like having a lot of numbers to remember. I want it right in front of me.

And then I thought about how my original impulses had been to use armor for damage reduction; I like that intuitively. I like that plate mail reduces more damage than leather does. My original draft of the rules had this in place, but it became a game killer; a monster that deals 4 damage would NEVER be able to damage a warrior in heavy plate mail that soaks 6 - because my original draft said that armor always worked. In later drafts, I said that armor only worked some of the time, but then it always worked the same way when it did: heavier armor was just better at doing that thing.

But, I realized this morning I could marry the two concepts… and I could move ALL resistant checks from attribute checks to level checks. In fact, I could give the whole concept of level check its own new moniker (like ‘save’ or ‘test’ or ‘feat’ or ‘resist’ or ‘mitigate’ or something simple and clean and elegant and that sounds nice when I say it 832 times in the core rules).

The shift is this: When you try to stop something bad from happening to you, roll 1d12 + your level. If you roll a total of 10 or better, you did it! You used your experience and training (which level directly reflects) to position your armor to absorb part of that attack, your persona to reduce that dark magic damage, or your stamina to neutralize some of that poison. If you roll a natural 12, you did even a little better than that (like +2).

Now, the problem here is that if you have a rating of 0 in something, you are only reducing damage on a natural 12. I suppose we could go with 11 being +1 and 12 being +2. This is elegant (1 is 1 and 2 is 2… so that’s good and gives nuance and is easy to remember) plus, even with a rating of 0, there is always a reason to roll.

The revised language would look like this…

• Against a physical attack: Check level; if successful, soak armor.

• Against a poison: Check level; if successful, soak stamina.

• Against an arcane spell: Check level; if successful, soak reason.

I can then scale back damage quite a bit, because instead of 20 dragon breath being mitigated to 10, it may only be mitigated by 6 points… so even 12 or 14 starting points is pretty significant. 

A shield can still give you +1 edge on armor checks.

Standard weapons deal 2-5 damage.

Heavy weapons deal might + 2-5 damage.

So, in play, this becomes really clean. You attack with your greatsword (damage 5) against a foe with armor 2.

If you hit with a result of 10+, you deal 5 damage. If you roll a natural 11, you hit for 6 damage. If you roll a natural 12, you deal 7 damage. 

Your foe with armor 2 then checks level. With a result of 10+, they soak 2 of that damage. On a natural 11, they soak 3. On a natural 12, they soak 4.

Buh. Dang. One roll each time. Numbers scale. There’s a lot of variety. You can ‘hit’ and deal anywhere from 1 to 7 points of damage, depending on your attack result and the opposing level check.

Ahem.

Remember when I solved damage scaling in Hack’D & Slash’D? Yeah. That was AWESOME.

Scaling Results

In reading over Hack'D & Slash'D, and thinking about character growth (and even the growth of the game into other milieus), I've been considering damage... specifically, I'm thinking about how damage scales in crticial vs. half damage circumstances. In general, the rules look pretty solid when we're looking at a number like 4 - if 4 is your standard damage for an attack, then it doubles to 8 on a critical success, or halves to 2  on a partially blocked/neutralized attack. This works.

However, if you push the numbers to damage 12 (which might be for something like a dragon's bite), you end up with a much larger range - down to 6 on a partially blocked shot or up to 24 if the dragon lands a critical hit. 24 is a LOT of damage. But, this is a dragon after all... so it's not THAT crazy.

Just for fun, let's say we create a bit of a more structured tier system - like every 3 points is a 1 point modifier in either direction. This means that it scales like this:

1-3 [1]; 4-6 [2]; 7-9 [3]; 10-12 [4]; 13-15 [5]

Now, if your damage is 2 from a starter dirk, you are hitting for 1 (if armor soaks), 2 (on a normal hit) or 3 (if you crit); Conversely, that dragon is hitting for 8, 12, or 16. It's still got a solid range to it, but the numbers are a little more predicatable. A natural 12 on an armor check or resistant check still completely soaks a standard successful attack. You get bit by a dragon, you're probably suffering at least 8 damage, but your armor might help. 

Not sure how I feel about this... it feels more balanced, but it's a bit more mental math to keep track of. Although, to be honest, I'm not sure if remembering that 9 has +3/-3 attached to it is any harder than remembering that half of 9 rounds up to 5, and that it doubles to 18. And, parenthetically, 18 damage kills a level 3 character with stamina 1. 12 is a serious wound. It should be rare for a level 3 character to be one-shotted, but the type of damage I'm now suggesting would not be all that excessive.   

Hmmm. More stuff to consider and/or to play test and see how it runs...

EDIT:

The other possibilty here is to set a standard modifier for ranks of damage. If we go with the most common result (either 2 or 3) as the default, we end up with a range that looks something like this:

A weapon that deals 6 damage deals:

2 damage with -2 ranks of damage (standard hit vs. natural 12 armor check)

4 damage with -1 rank of damage (standard hit with successful armor check)

6 damage (standard hit with failed armor check)

8 damage with +1 rank of damage (natural 12 attack with failed armor check)

10 damage with +2 ranks of damage (natural 12 attack with natural 1 armor check)

Meh. This is a lot of numbers ot keep track of... I might just stick with what I have.

 

One die to rule them all

For Hack'D & Slash'D, I've gotten all of the mechanics down to two dice: The humble D6, and the possible even more humble D12. I was using the D12 for checks, and the D6 for results... but, in the last few days, I've streamlined even further so that a lot of the things I used the D6 for have been locked in as fixed values; hit points and damage were once the responsibility of the D6, but now they're hard wired in.

The D6 is still there for a handful of things - likelihoods, a few tables... but a D12 is basically just a D6 with twice as many sides, so it's a straight up conversion to move to D12 as the only die you need.

Well that's nifty.

I like it that you never wonder which die to roll this time - if you're rolling, it's a D12. I also like the change for likelihoods, because then I can stagger them a bit and put them on a bit of a bell curve:

• Very unlikely 1 only
• Unlikely 1-3
• Possible 1-6
• Likely 1-9
• Very likely 1-11

I think it's easy enough to remember - the front and back end end in 1, and the middle three are all divisibly by 3. So it's 1/3/6/9/11. Not hard to remember, and better represents the descriptors. Something that is very unlikely should occur less than 10% of the time, so that's solid.

Delvers of Daggerford Session 4

I've moved my Delvers to level 2. I mean, they have earned it, but I made a few tweaks to the XP rules to allow it to happen; they had been level 1 for three sessions, and that seemed like enough for them to have earned their way to level 2. Progression will slow from here, so I'm okay with that. Level 2 in this game is the rough equivalent of level 3/4 in B/X, so I'm fine with this being a level they sit at for a bit. They have some power, and they can take some damage. I still think a dragon with a decent breath weapon could take the whole group in one round, so they aren't THAT powerful. Heck, a level 4 fireball type spell will wipe them out with some failed checks.

Still, they're not bad.

Also, here's my really sketchy looking map (because the picture is sketchy - and I did it in pencil so it's a sketch).

The link to the actual play document is over to the left under the Hack'D & Slash'D resources, along with the most recent tweaks to the core rules, which get updated in real time.

Delvers of Daggerford Session 3

Look at me! I'm still playing and have now done three sessions with these characters. Am I thinking about other characters I'd like to play? Yes. Am I thinking about starting a different group, or maybe a solo game? Of course I am. Am I doing what I can to follow through with this group for a bit? Yes. Yes I am.

That said, I like the changes to the rules and how they've cleaned up combat. Combat goes quite a bit quicker now, but there's still a good amount of variety (and almost more) to combat. I realized that starting weapons are pretty lame, but that's good - they're starting weapons. I think that the upgrades I've just made to the characters will already make them a bit more formidable, even though they are still only level 1. If they had managed an extra 150 gold or so, they'd be REALLY well off. As is, they're in pretty good shape. They have already discovered a few ways to get either up into the castle or down to deeper levels, and they have a small section of this area to still explore (F, G, H), and the western staircase (from A) that I haven't drawn a map for yet. Not sure what'd down there... 

Looking forward to session 4, and hoping they start getting some real momentum towards level 2. They are a little over a third of the way there. Progress feels a little slow, but since the game only really goes to level 6, it's okay if they linger on levels for a little while. By level 3, they will be a pretty formidable group (if I or they make it that long).