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level 1 nuke spell

Tuesday, January 11th, 2011

I must be insane. It occurred to me to give a SPELL THAT AUTO-KILLS EVERYONE to EVERY WIZARD. And I kind of think it’s a good idea.

Let me explain my thinking. Ever since 1e, one of the fundamental conceits of D&D has been that the PCs wander through a dungeon and run into bite-sized encounters. Even if the dungeon is occupied by, say, a tribe of orcs, the orcs never mass into an army: they run into the PCs in dribs and drabs until they are all slaughtered.

It would be pretty stupid to try to find an in-game explanation for this. But let’s start down that dark path. How can we justify this?

If it was well-known that every wizard had a daily spell that allowed them to effortlessly slaughter armies, it would change the world’s military tactics. You wouldn’t mass into an army as much. If you did, you’d risk losing your entire army to one spell. You’d be better off dividing your army into several units which traveled separately. Suddenly, military forces look a lot more like D&D adventuring parties and their adversaries.

What if an adventuring party invaded your dungeon? You’d have your units widely spread apart, hunkered down in separate rooms. That way, you’d be nullifying the advantage of the wizard’s nuke spell.

OK, that’s my “simulationist” thinking. Here’s my “gamist” thinking.
(more…)

Posted in 4e D&D, fluff/inspiration, game design, RPG Hub | 11 Comments »

mazed in monsters

Monday, January 10th, 2011
This entry is part 19 of 34 in the series Mazes and Monsters

OK, we’ve got pretty much a complete game out of Mazes and Monsters. We’ve figured out combat, skills and spells: everything we need for a generic sword-and-sorcery game.

All that’s remaining are a few Mazes-and-Monsters-specific rules hints dropped by the characters. Frankly, a lot of them don’t receive a lot of rules support in the movie at all, and some almost seem like offhand fake-jargon that’s being made up on the spot. But we know that
THAT’S
NOT
TRUE.

There is Underlying Truth to be found here: we just have to dig it up.

Get your shovels!

Mazed

One of the focuses of Mazes and Monsters is the thin line between fantasy and reality.

Equally thin is the line between players and characters. Both players and characters can become confused about what’s real and what’s not.

We’ve determined that when a character is confused, they enter the “Mazed” condition. A Mazed character’s mini is placed in a special square on the Mazes and Monsters gameboard, which I will call the “Maze Prison”.

Mazes and Monsters boardWhen a character is Mazed, their perception of reality can be skewed by whoever is imposing the condition. Friends may appear enemies and vice versa; an open door may appear to be a solid wall; or the character may be totally immersed in a fantasy world that has no connection to reality (or, technically, a fantasy world that has no connection to the shared fantasy world of Mazes and Monsters: a higher level of fantasy, if you will.) All details of the fantasy are determined by the creature or effect that imposes it.

The power of a Maze is measured by the RONA check to escape it. Like other RONAs, it ranges from 3 (Easy) to 9 (Hard).

When an effect Mazes you, you may make an immediate RONA check to shake off the illusion. If you succeed, it exerts no more power over you. If you fail, you are locked into the illusion until some outside force challenges your delusion. Such an event is called a Maze Disruption, and it allows you to make a new RONA check, against the same difficulty, to break free of the illusion. If this new check fails, you incorporate the disruption within the Maze delusion, and that same effect will no longer provide you with a chance to break free.

Example Maze Disruptions:
-If you’ve been Mazed to believe an open door is a solid wall, you may make a new RONA check if someone passes through the door.
-If you’ve been Mazed to think that your friend is a fierce Gorville, you may make a new RONA check if your friend talks to you and reminds you of your shared friendship.

Caution: According to Mazes and Monsters, these are rules for real life as well!

Next week: We’ll cover more movie jargon, “fantasies and scenarios”! Will this be the sexiest Mazes and Monsters article yet??

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Posted in advice/tools, fluff/inspiration, game design, legacy D&D, news, other systems, RPG Hub | 3 Comments »

African Civilizations: best sourcebook ever

Friday, January 7th, 2011

African Civilizations by Graham Connah

African Civilizations by Graham Connah

Wow, I got more than a dozen blog posts about game ideas out of this book. This book gave me more D&D inspiration than most WOTC sourcebooks I can remember. Not surprising: books of archaeology and history are likely to spur a lot of campaign settings ideas.

A book about Africa is uniquely suited to D&D idea mining. For one thing, it’s unfamiliar. Your D&D group may have some medieval history buffs in it. Fewer groups have any Africa experts. I never learned about pre-colonial African history in school. (In fact, a lot of its history was entirely unknown until archaeological work in the last few decades.) As far as my familiarity with the subject matter went, the history in this book might as well have been the history of an alternate Earth. Which is basically what a D&D campaign world is: that plus magic.

After my reading, I didn’t end up with an Africa-themed campaign: I still have a typically Western European fantasy world. However, the interaction of these two milieus provided some interesting and peculiar details. The Plateau of Spirits and the Raid Year, the sacrifice of the Stag King, the roadside altars, the Wind of No Return, the Elves of the Ruins, and the dwarven soul discs give specificity to my campaign world.

Posted in fluff/inspiration, news, RPG Hub | 1 Comment »

harvestmen

Thursday, January 6th, 2011

Have you guys heard the term “harvestmen”?

“Harvestman” seems to be a folk name for what I always called a daddy long-legs: a scarier, more awesome name, I think. It’s ominous even before you know that harvestmen are giant freaky spider-things.

The name “harvestmen” practically comes with a built-in adventure. Imagine a village where people keep on warning the PCs about the coming of the Harvestmen. Maybe no one in the village is older than 30. Then these leggy spider guys finally show up. They’re harvesting the older villagers, including any older PCs.

Real harvestmen have a stink attack that they use when threatened, and their legs continue to twitch after they are severed, which in D&D terms means, I think, that severed legs attack independently.

By the way, harvestmen reproduce sexually. Maybe only female villagers are harvested. Creepy!

Posted in fluff/inspiration, RPG Hub | 2 Comments »

The Completely Unofficial Errata and House Rules for Gamma World

Wednesday, January 5th, 2011

It’s no secret that Gamma World is due for some Errata. 4e Gamma World did a great job of updating the rules on its predecessor while still capturing the wacky fun that (I imagine) made the original Gamma World so fun to play!

However, several powers in the core book and in the expansion, Famine in Far-Go, have action types (minor, standard, move) and usage types (at-will, encounter) that are downright strange, and if taken at face-value, make the game a lot less fun to play! Furthermore, I think there are some pretty easy tweaks that can be made to the game system to increase balance and enjoyability!

Quick Note: I really appreciate the wackiness of Gamma World, but I think a certain balance in class powers is essential towards keeping up the fun atmosphere that this game encourages. For example, if I roll up a thematically interesting character but dread playing them because their powers are worse than useless, that hurts everyone’s game experience! So my goal with these errata and house rules is to make as many wacky combinations fun and playable as possible:

1. All [W] single target attack powers (not bursts or blasts) add + TWICE LEVEL to damage instead of + LEVEL. This includes basic melee and ranged attacks.
-Weapon powers fall way behind in damage at higher levels.

2. All [W] attack powers that can target multiple targets (including bursts and blasts) add + LEVEL to damage instead of not adding + LEVEL to damage.
-Weapon powers fall way behind in damage at higher levels.

3. All Novice Powers are STANDARD actions.
-Lodestone Lure is way too powerful as a minor action.

4. All Novice Powers are AT-WILL powers.
-Some powers are listed as Encounter for no obvious reason!

5. The Alien Engineering Power (Famine in Far-Go Page 9) adds 5 + INT + TWICE LEVEL extra damage instead of 5 + INT + LEVEL extra damage.
-This power needs to be updated to reflect change #1.

6. Nuke it From Orbit targets REFLEX instead of DEXTERITY.
-Clearly just a mixup.

7. Big Scary Monster (Famine in Far-Go Page 24) adds +2 to the attack roll vs AC. Multiplicitiy (Core Book Page 38) adds +2 to the attack roll vs AC. Power Dive (Core Book Page 44) adds +2 to the attack roll vs AC.
-Nonweapon attacks versus AC need a bonus, since AC tends to be higher than other defenses.

8. Expert Ape Training (Famine in Far-Go Page 25) DOES NOT have the +2 bonus to attack rolls. Exploit Weakness (Core Book Page 45) DOES NOT have the +2 bonus to attack roles.
-These already have appropriate bonuses to hit and in both cases it looks like the +2 bonus was placed on the wrong side of the page.

Posted in 4e D&D, RPG Hub | 4 Comments »

legal battles on the battlegrid

Tuesday, January 4th, 2011

Let’s say you’re running a city campaign, and you decide (for whatever reason) that you don’t want your players to treat your city like a dungeon with no roof, kicking in every door and murdering indiscriminately. On the other hand, everyone likes a fight, and you want to pack in at least one combat per game session! This can send mixed signals to a player. How will they know when it’s “this guy is dangerous, but we can’t just murder him” time and when it’s “kill the threat to the city and get a medal” time?

Bring law onto the battle grid. Historically (or at least historical-fictionally), dangerous cities had codes of acceptable violence. Dueling laws separated honorable heroes from murderers.

The laws don’t have to be complete, and they don’t even have to make much sense. There’s just one quality they need: they must be SHORT. Players don’t have space in their brain for a whole new legal system. The entire law code should be no longer than, say, a feat description.

Here’s one potential law system, or at least the part that’s relevant to players:

The Blood for Blood Law
If you kill someone who has not physically injured you or an ally, you are guilty of murder.

Make this a strict rule in your city. Anyone who breaks it (with witnesses) will face serious consequences. Let the players know that this is the rubric for when they are not allowed to kill people within city limits. (There are other laws, of course. An assassin who is injured by his mark doesn’t get off scot free. At the very least, he’s breaking and entering.)

The lawmakers’ intent behind the Blood for Blood Law was to prevent murders masquerading as duels. If an adventurer forces a shopkeeper into a duel, and kills him, is it a fair fight? If the shopkeeper got in a hit, maybe it is. If the adventurer beats the shopkeeper without taking a scratch, that suggests that the adventurer was far more skilled than the shopkeeper, and it’s MURDER.

Say the PCs are attacked by their enemies: enemies who could be… awkward if left alive. Are the PCs allowed to kill them? Not until the enemies get some hits in. Once they smack a PC for a few points of damage, they become fair game. Also: that guy in the back, shooting arrows at the PCs and missing every time? He’ll have to be dealt with nonlethally. Or you can make a Bluff check to blame a self-inflicted wound on him.

Does it make sense? Not really. But it’s the law of the land. And it works better with D&D than more sensible rules: it doesn’t forbid combat, it just saddles it with arbitrary restrictions.

Posted in advice/tools, fluff/inspiration, RPG Hub | 1 Comment »

blog of holding’s first year

Thursday, December 30th, 2010

We’ve been blogging since mid-February 2010, and in that time we’ve written almost 250 posts. At first, we were posting once or twice a week. There have been occasional hyper moments: sometimes when we went to Gencon or liveblogged Essentials we posted up to 8 posts a day. In recent months, though, we’ve been posting pretty steadily about 4 or 5 posts a week.

Along the way, we’ve done a couple things I’m proud of: put the Monster Manual 3 on a business card, gotten a favorable review from Mike Mearls, re-invented a seminal RPG, and fixed 4e.

All of this supports my theory that Blog of Holding is a bunch of badasses. You can bounce a nickel of the rock hard abs of our RPG musings. And the nickel will come back a dime.

Next year, the goals are: 1) hit 500 posts, and 2) be mentioned favorably in a press conference by the President of the United States.

Also, tour the world with our rock band, “Blog of Holding Dot Com”.

Posted in news, RPG Hub | 3 Comments »

the elves of the ruins

Tuesday, December 28th, 2010

The Zimbabwe plateau is filled with monumental stone structures, built during the European medieval and renaissance period. Archaeologists don’t really know what people built them. In the 19th century, archaeologists found that the people currently living in the ruins didn’t know who had built them either, or what they were for. They had just moved into some empty ruins.

African Civilizations by Graham Connah

African Civilizations by Graham Connah

OK, so it would be cool to have a people living in and among the ruins of an unidentified higher civilization. Who should the current inhabitants be?

Old-school elves are surprisingly good candidates.
(more…)

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Posted in 4e D&D, fluff/inspiration, legacy D&D, news, RPG Hub | 1 Comment »

christmas ghost stories

Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010

Christmas-day passed as it generally does in the country, that is to say, in a most jovial, social way; and after fun, frolic, sport, pastime, forfeit, dance, and cards, I stood once more within the haunted chamber with the strange sensation upon me, that though I had met with nothing so far to alarm me – this night, a night when, of all nights in the year, spirits might be expected to break loose, I was to suffer for my temerity.

(“Haunted by Spirits”, by George Manville Fenn, 1867)

It may seem strange to us today, but in the Victorian era, Christmas was a traditional time for ghost stories. A Christmas Carol is really the only one that’s survived, but there were lots more. (Also note the peculiar line in “It’s The Most Wonderful Time of the Year:” “There’ll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago.”)

If your D&D group isn’t on holiday break, maybe you should continue this Victorian tradition by running a ghost-story one-shot.

Here’s a prompt: Write a ghost story in which one of the characters is named Tiny Tim. Charles Dickens wrote one such story. There are other possibilities. And in many of them, Tiny Tim is terrifying.

Posted in RPG Hub | No Comments »

the magic king

Friday, December 17th, 2010

I’ve mentioned before that in a D&D world, where magic works, we should trust ceremony. One ceremony I haven’t discussed yet is the anointing of a king. In Africa this was apparently very important: African Civilizations mentions that all the African civilizations studied in the book appear to use religious ideology to support the power of its ruling class. In some places in central Africa, kings were worshiped as recently as the 20th century.

African Civilizations by Graham Connah

African Civilizations by Graham Connah

D&D, and fantasy in general, tends to be deeply conservative, in that its heroes tend to be the type who support the status quo, or want to return a recent status quo. They oppose evil forces who want to change things for the worse. (Liberal fantasy would be, I guess, about educating the peasants or something: change would generally be regarded in a more positive light.)

Because fantasy is conservative, it idealizes the institution of kingship. The rules of monarchy have the power of natural law.

A king has a lot of political powers, but in a magical world, I think a king has some magical powers too.

a) A king’s blood is sacred. A subject who kills his rightful king will fall under a curse, probably for many generations.

b) A king has ritual powers. A king can perform “speech acts”: appointing people knights and nobles, and probably performing weddings and funerals, too, like the captain of a boat.

b) A king has healing powers. In medieval England, for instance, a king’s touch was supposed to cure tuberculosis. Between this and the ritual powers, a king basically has all the powers of a cleric. Makes sense, since if a king is not in the “leader” role, who is?

c) A king has powers related to national defense. Many kingdoms probably have some magic items or rituals usable only by the true king in defense of the kingdom. Excalibur comes to mind.

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Posted in advice/tools, fluff/inspiration, news, RPG Hub | 2 Comments »

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