how’s this for d&d timekeeping: it’s always now!

January 28th, 2013

I’m a logistics-light DM, so I never tracked time. Before the endless 5e playtest, back when I occasionally ran actual campaigns, I’d sometimes have the game weather match the real weather, and that was about it. I think that’s how a lot of DMs play, and I actually think it’s not a bad system.

I have some ideas for pushing this non-system a little farther. Some of the ideas are sillier than others. I’m not sure if I’d always want to play this way, but it’s worth an experiment – next time I run a campaign.

What year and month is it in D&D? It’s always now. For instance, in real life, it’s January ’13. If I started a D&D adventure right now, it’d be set in January ’13. Maybe not 2013, but the thirteenth year in some century.

What century is it? That’s determined by the edition you’re playing. If you’re playing Fourth Edition, it’s January 413 – the thirteenth year of the Fourth Age. If you play First Edition, it’s the year 113. In OD&D, it’s plain old Year 13. This calendar system will work for the next eighty-seven real years, by which time we’ll all be dead.

Tweaks: If you play 3.5, maybe it’s the year 363: 350 + 13. Pathfinder game: 375 + 13. If you’re playing 13th Age, it’s the year 1313. Auspicious!

How time passes: Generally, the fantasy-world date keeps up with the real date. If two weeks pass between game sessions, two weeks pass in the game world. Exceptions: a single day’s adventure might take multiple sessions, or the players might take a five-day boat trip during a session. In this case, fantasy and real time get out of sync. However, between sessions, the fantasy date advances to the current date.

the four-hour work week
Reading 2e books, I discovered that the “adventure” and the game session used to be virtually synonymous. Nowadays, we think of session-based mechanics as strictly indie-game territory. Interestingly, in the “it’s always now” system, you can tie renewable resources to the session. If you play in a weekly D&D game, you can have hit points and spells fully recharge every in-game week. Thus, you can’t rest and recharge multiple times in a single game session. The five-minute workday is gone.

Sometimes, beat-up characters do need rest. I’d say that the players can always rest overnight during the course of a game session, recovering most of their hit points and a few spells. Complete rest, though, requires a week of off-time – for the players AND characters.

travel
Another obstacle to the “it’s always now” method is that you can’t easily hand-wave two weeks of travel. You’ll want to adjust your hex-crawl parameters so that a week of wilderness travel frequently takes at least a session.

festivals!
A bonus of using today’s date: My DMing practice is that, when the PCs enter a village and ask what’s going on, there’s equal chances of 1) business as usual, 2) supernatural crisis, or 3) a festival. Using the real date helps you schedule real-holiday-appropriate festivals (and supernatural crises, for Halloween). Festivals offer lots of opportunities for silly competitions and quests. I’ve had PCs win ice-sculpture contests at the Ice Festival, compete in pumpkin-throwing and pie-eating contests at the Pumpkin Fair, and look for lost May Queens at the spring holiday.

weather
Another bonus: you can use the real world as your weather generator. If your players come in tracking snow on your floor, you can throw a blizzard into the adventure. Note: This doesn’t work for people who live in California. Those characters, like their players, live in a typical D&D campaign: an unrealistically clement fairyland.

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treasure from Quag Keep

January 25th, 2013

From Andre Norton’s flawed D&D novel, Quag Keep:

“Warrior.” Now he addressed Naile directly. “To my Lord, money is nothing. A year ago he found the hidden Temple of Tung and all its once-locked treasures are under his hand. I am empowered to draw upon them to secure any rarity. What say you to a sword of seven spells, a never-fail shield, a necklet of lyra gems such as not even the king of the Great Kingdom can hope to hold, a-“

How about that? 3 D&D treasures that have never been written up. Google reveals that the only reference to any of “sword of seven spells”, “never-fail shield” or “lyra gems” is from Quag Keep. So what do they do exactly?

The problem is that they seem like they might be a bit too powerful. Specifically, the “never-fail shield” seems like it should protect you from all harm, which is obviously overpowered. Let’s say that, once a day, you can use the never-fail shield to block one attack or spell, but you must decide to use the shield’s power before the attack roll or saving throw.

As for the sword of seven spells: it’s probably equivalent to a combined +1 sword/scroll with 7 random spells on it, except that only Fighting Men can use the spells. Once each spell has been used, it can’t be used again. When all 7 spells are used, it’s nothing but a +1 sword.

It’s possible that when you use up a spell, you use it up only for yourself, so once you’re finished with it, you should hand it to the Fighting Man next to you.

As for lyra gems, they’re probably nonmagical, but clearly very valuable. Maybe they’re the next price category of gems, above diamonds.

“Masterly — masterly and as evil as the Nine and Ninety Sins of Salzak, the Spirit Murderer.”

This is an offhand comment that I’m throwing in because this Salzak, the Spirit Murderer sounds awesome. Use Salzak as your campaign villain and you will be using a bit of Greyhawk canon that hasn’t been used since 1978.

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revenant ankh, leveled

January 22nd, 2013

Last year I set out to create interesting variations on each of the thirteen Wondrous Items in the 4e Player’s Handbook. I wanted to add a little unpredictability to 4e magic treasure, which can sometimes feel dull because you often know exactly what you’re getting.

The Revenant Ankh is the last of the PHB’s Wondrous Items, and I’m converting it pretty much at the end if the 4e development cycle. From the recent Fifth Edition beta release, it looks like magic items will be more exciting in the new edition: the new “secrets” and “attunement” mechanics can provide the same sort of magic item improvement that I’ve tried to provide in these blog posts.

Let’s wrap up by providing three variations on the Revenant Ankh, a strange item that temporarily resurrects an ally for a few rounds. Some time after you obtain it, you could realize that your Revenant Ankh is actually one of these models.

Dark Revenant Ankh: If you die while clutching this revenant ankh, its powers operate on you. Your life is temporarily sustained by dark energy. If you manage to kill a humanoid creature (getting the killing shot) before you die, you absorb its life energy and you are freed of the effects of the ankh – you are now alive. However, you change faces with the slain creature until the next extended rest.

Revenant Ankh of Slavery: This ankh can be used on a defeated enemy instead of an ally. In this case, you control the creature: it is dominated. Elite or solo monsters and creatures with level higher than the user’s level get a saving throw at the end of each round: on a success, they die.

Revenant Ankh of Slow but Inevitable Revenge: Your risen ally rises with speed 4, +5 to all defenses, and +5 to hit against the creature that killed him.

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Quag Keep: alternate-history D&D

January 18th, 2013

Quag Keep is a bizarre book. It’s the first D&D novel (it was published in 1978, so it was written before Advanced Dungeons and Dragons came out). It’s by Andre Norton, an Appendix N author and a well-respected fantasy/sci fi writer, above the level of most licensed-setting writers. And yet it’s neither a great novel nor a great D&D book.

It seems to be based on a alternate-dimension version of Greyhawk D&D: there are many ideas that are quite interesting, but don’t appear anywhere else in D&D canon. Perhaps this can be explained by the book’s blurb:

“In 1976, Andre Norton was invited to play a new sort of adventure game, Dungeons & Dragons. Its creator, E Gary Gygax, introduced Norton to his world of Greyhawk. After a session of world building, role playing, and fantasy adventuring, Norton wrote “Quag Keep”, a tale of six adventurers from our world who journey to the city of Greyhawk in order to aid a wizard and unlock the secrets of the stronghold of “Quag Keep”.”

It makes a lot of sense that Andre wrote this after a session of D&D, not multiple sessions, and presumably without a lot of subsequent input from Gary.

The book is interesting as a piece of D&D history. It’s also interesting as a different take on D&D: a way D&D could have gone, had it taken a different branch in the road. Who knows, maybe it has some ideas worth bringing back into D&D canon.

I’ll read Quag Keep and look for its idiosyncrasies and see if I can figure out ways to use any of them in a game.

OK, here’s the basic premise: a bunch of real-world people get sucked into a game of D&D, where they are railroaded into an adventure via a geas. OK Go!

Boar helm, boar cloak-memories and knowledge Milo did not consciously search for arose. This other was a berserker, and one with skill enough to turn were-boar if he so desired.

1978 was well before the introduction of the Barbarian class, so the berserker here is either a Fighting Man or some unique pre-barbarian class. It seems like the latter, since at high level, the character gains the ability to turn into a were-boar. It’s an interesting idea for a class. I actually seem to remember reading something similar to this in an early piece of Dragon Magazine fiction, so maybe there was a fan-made Berserker class floating around somewhere.

Nor was he surprised that the stranger should have the pseudo-dragon as a traveling companion or pet, whichever their relationship might be. For the weres, like the elves and some others, could communicate with animals at will.

More details about the Berserker class! And also, incidentally, details about the elven race that you won’t find in the PHB: they can speak Animal.

This makes me think that it might be kind of cool to add a few languages to the usual D&D collection of Common, Goblin, Lawful Good, etc: maybe 5 or so animal language (Wolfish, spoken by mammal predators; Deer, spoken by mammal herbivores; Avian, spoken by birds; Piscian, fish; etc.) Let them be taken as bonus languages just like any other language. Maybe they would be restricted to “weres, elves and some others.”

The eternal war between Law and Chaos flared often in Greyhawk. It was in a manner of speaking a “free city”-since it had no one overlord to hold it firmly to his will. For that reason it had become a city of masterless men, a point from which many expeditions, privately conceived and planned for the despoiling of ancient treasures, would set out, having recruited the members from just such masterless men as Milo himself, or perhaps the berserker only an arm’s length away. But if those on the side of Law recruited here, so did the followers of Chaos. There were neutrals also, willing to join with either side for the sake of payment. But they were never to be wholly depended upon by any man who had intelligence, for they might betray one at the flip of a coin or the change of the wind itself.
…
As a swordsman Milo was vowed to Law. The berserker had more choice in such matters. But this place, under its odors of fresh and stale food, stank to Milo of Chaos.

As D&D has gone on, the importance of the battle between Law and Chaos has gradually diminished. in 1978, it was still a big thing. But the importance of the “eternal war” in Quag Keep is maybe even more important than it is in the OD&D rules. It’s explicitly a game-world concept, like race, not a meta-game concept like class or hit points. Furthermore, it’s a palpable thing: Milo can smell it.

Speaking of in-game concepts: as a “swordsman” (an OD&D level title for Fighting Men, right?) Milo is “sworn to Law.” It’s hard to say exactly what this means in QD&D (Quag Keep D&D), but it might mean that a) all Fighting Men are lawful and b) OD&D level titles aren’t metagame descriptors: they are the names of in-world military orders or ranks.

Berserkers, apparently, don’t have to be lawful: more evidence that they’re a separate class from Fighting Men.

“Deav Dyne, who puts his faith in the gods men make for themselves.” There was exasperation in the wizard’s voice as he spoke the name of the next. By his robe of gray, faced with white, Deav Dyne was a follower of Landron-of-the-Inner-Light and of the third rank.

Perhaps the most interest thing about Quag Keep is that nearly everything that I think of as a game-only concept turns out to be explicitly known by the characters in the novel. Deav Dyne is a third level (or rank) cleric. Furthermore, he wears a color-coded robe that shows that he is a third level cleric. When he advances to fourth level, he’ll get a new robe.

This makes it more plausible that Milo’s title of “swordsman” is also an identification of his character level. (Furthermore, later in the novel, someone says that Milo is “a swordsman, a rank that marks you as a seasoned fighting man.”)

The other interesting thing from this passage: Deav wears a robe. In QD&D, clerics are clothies.

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cursing the thoroughness of the caller

January 16th, 2013

REFEREE: The chest with the poison needle is full of copper pieces – appears to be about 2,000 of them.
CALLER: Empty out all the copper pieces and check the trunk for secret drawers or a false bottom, and do the same with the empty one. Also, do there seem to be any old boots or cloaks among the old clothes in the rubbish pile?
REFEREE: (Cursing the thoroughness of the caller!) The seemingly empty trunk has a false bottom…

OD&D, as described in the sample of play, is unique in that the DM seems to be TRYING TO HIDE HIS CONTENT FROM THE PLAYERS. It’s not just adversarial, it’s gnostic. The DM gets some kind of joy if they miss the treasure – but he still places the treasure.

I’m not convinced that this is really what OD&D game was like. When I played with Mike Mornard, I never got the feeling that Mike was rooting for us to ignore treasure. He might have created lots of treasure we never saw, but but he’d be happy if we were smart enough to earn it.

Trying to twist this example around into something I can understand, I can see playing OD&D as a game more like the Descent boardgame than the D&D I’m used to: the DM is bound by certain rules of fair play, but is actually in competition with the players. If the PCs find more than half of the treasure, the players win. If the DM manages to outsmart the players by concealing more than half of the treasure, he wins.

Naturally, at the end of such a game, the DM would reveal all the hiding places of treasure, and cackle. “There was an onyx in that desk in the Gnoll room, but you walked right by it. (cackle). The pile of discarded rubbish contained Elven Boots, guess you should have checked that out. (cackle)”

Onwards, friends, to more and better loot!

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At what level do these game elements become irrelevant?

January 14th, 2013

The following chart shows the character level when certain game elements (encumbrance, overland travel, light sources, keys, death, food, nonmagic equipment, camping) can be ignored by most D&D parties. I’ve charted 1e AD&D, 3.5, and 4e, because I don’t have 2e, and because 2e is usually pretty similar to 1e.

(Click to enlarge)

Note on encumbrance: I don’t know when 1e parties typically get Bags of Holding, but it’s probably before level 9. 3e parties, on the other hand, may not all buy Handy Haversacks at level 3, although they can afford to.

Note on overland travel: Would you trust the unreliable 1e Teleport for your overland travel, or wait for Teleport Without Error? How about the more forgiving 3e Teleport? I decided that 3e Teleport’s mild risks were more acceptable than those of 1e Teleport, which always carried at least 1% chance of instant death.

Note on light sources: Torches and Light spells are always available at level 1: the level given is the level at which no one in the party need hold a torch or lantern.

Note on keys: 1e Knock can open locks at level 3; the level given for each edition, though, is the level at which the party can deal with an arbitrarily large number of locks in one day.

Finally: Yes, I know that the real level that everything becomes irrelevant is “when the DM says it does.” If your DM doesn’t track encumbrance, it’s never relevant. If your DM wants your 20th level characters to be too poor to buy plate armor, that can happen. This chart is intended to mark the level at which the game designers think a subsystem is no longer the focus of the game.

Let me know if I missed any reliable ways to ignore a subsystem earlier than the level I specified: and help me fill in 2e information.

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give me a hand with this chest

January 11th, 2013

Last week I mentioned a bizarre trapped chest from a Sax Rohmer novel. Here’s another weird chest, from The Star Venturers by pulp-sci-fi author Kenneth Bulmer:

A door slid aside in the far wall. Through this opening walked two young girls, each clad in a bikini and boots, each carrying the ornate silver hands of an ebony box swung between them, the hands a left and a right, making a pair.

OK, the bikini-and-boots thing may be a little over the top, but the chest is cool. Its two hand-handles might be decorative, might be a trap, but also might be part of a puzzle to open some hidden compartment.

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od&d staves

January 9th, 2013

The standout magic items from OD&D are the staves. They seem like they’re much more powerful than everything else.

Compare the best magic sword with a Staff of Fireballs:

Magic sword: +3 to hit, +0 to damage (so, 1d6 damage).

Staff of Fireballs: Shoots fireballs that do 8d6 damage (save for half). 8d6 is a lot of damage in a game in which the strongest monsters have 12d6 HP. The Purple Worm is the outlier, with 15 Hit Dice, but it will still die in two hits.

And the Staff of Fireball has 100 CHARGES.

Compare that to the equivalent item, Wand of Fireballs, from 3rd edition: it throws 6d6 fireballs and has 50 charges. Furthermore, in 3rd edition, monsters have d8 Hit Dice, and they have more of them. (For instance, dragons have 5-38 HD instead of 5-12 HD.)

Not only that, the Staff of Power is like a Staff of Fireballs with a bunch of other abilities. The Staff of Wizardry is like a Staff of Power with a bunch of other abilities. Between these 3 items, about 10% of staves have the ability to fire 8-die fireballs. You only have a 2% chance of getting the sword +3.

The Staff of Fireballs family might not even be the most game-changing staves in the game. The staff I’d want is “Staff of Secret Doors and Trap Detection.” It has 100% chance of detecting both; it works within 20 feet; and it doesn’t have charges. It’s operational as long as it’s being held. It’s SO MUCH better than having a thief in your party, guys.

Traps (and secret doors) are such a major part of OD&D-style dungeon crawling that I can hardly imagine them removed. Imagine a campaign where that entire aspect of the game was thrown away. I think the DM would have to resort to semi-cheating in order to downplay the staff’s power: “Well technically the lever that turned you all into insects was a TRICK, not a TRAP.” “You detect a trap in the corridor which is THE ONLY WAY OUT OF THE DUNGEON.” “I know you can detect secret doors, but the treasure was hidden behind a CONCEALED DOOR.”

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what constitutes an “adventure?”

January 7th, 2013

Earlier editions frequently make references to the “adventure” as if it were a discrete unit of some sort. I’ve never known exactly what it is. Is it, like, one game module? One game session? One game day?

Here’s an interesting passage from the 2e DMG, in which “adventure” seems to be used as a synonym for “game session”:

Most passing time occurs within a single adventure: Spells rarely carry over from adventure to adventure (unless the session is stopped with the characters lost in winding caverns or the like); rounds of combat, while taking several game minutes, don’t affect or spill over into subsequent adventures; days of travel often have no effect other than healing and the consumption of supplies.

If the DM wants, this is the only sort of timekeeping required. Time passed in previous adventures has little or no effect on the current session–each session or adventure is distinct and separate. For example, in one adventure, the characters spend a few hours in the dungeon, get injured, have some success, and return wounded. The night’s game session ends with them returning to their home base. Next game session, the DM announces, “A week or so has passed since you last went out. Everybody is healed and rested. People with spells can pick new ones.” The DM has chosen not to worry about the passage of time in this instance. An entire campaign can be played this way. Here’s another example: In one adventure, a group of characters travels for three weeks and has several encounters, ending camped outside some ruins. The next session starts after the characters have camped for five days, so they can heal their wounds. Several hours pass as they explore the ruins, but no one is particularly hurt when they return to camp, and the game session ends.

The next session starts the morning after their previous adventure, everyone having gotten a good rest. The characters set out again. They spend a week on the road and arrive at a village. Here, the mage insists everyone wait while he researches a vital spell. Again, the game session ends. The next session begins two months later, after the mage has learned his spell and continues from there.

It’s difficult to read “adventure” as anything other than a synonym for “session” in here. If it did, a “session stopped with the characters lost in winding caverns” would not, as it does, constitute two adventures. Also, constructions like “In one adventure… Next game session…” suggest that there is no distinction in the authors’ minds between the concepts.

And what do you make of this advice from the D&D Companion set?

After reaching “Name” level, characters should gain a new level for each 3 to 8 adventures. More adventures can cause player frustration; fewer adventures can make the game too easy, and eventually bore them. If you play twice or more each week, 6 to 8 adventures per level gained is recommended. If your games are once a week or less often, 3 to 5 adventures per level are recommended.

Again, “adventure” here may well be a synonym for “game session”. If not, what’s the relevance of the number of times you play per week? If it doesn’t mean game session, what does it mean? One castle? One dungeon? One module?

On the other hand, “adventure” is sometimes used as a synonym for “module”. The D&D Expert set says, for instance, that “The Isle of Dread is a wilderness adventure designed for use with the D&D Expert rules.” There’s no way that the Isle of Dread is meant to be played in one session. And there’s no way that characters are meant to play through 3 to 8 giant modules like Isle of Dread in order to gain one level.

Is “adventure” one of those words like “level” with a lot of meanings?

I have a feeling that “adventure” usually means something vague: not exactly “game session”, but maybe “the amount of exploration that the DM thinks will take approximately one game session”. But I’m interested in what you guys think. Is there some old-school assumption about this word’s meaning that never made it into a rule book?

Lots of games have explicit game-session mechanics. Savage Worlds give you so many bennies per game session, for instance. Many D&D fans reject the idea of something that artificial as an explicit rules element. However, it seems to me that the game session has been baked into D&D since at least the 80s.

The funny thing is that 5e developers say that they’re thinking of returning to the “adventure” as an explicit challenge-balancing mechanism. If you take them literally, that sounds like a return to the game session as as a game mechanic.

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a trapped chest

January 4th, 2013

Here’s a classic D&D-ism from the 1917 pulp novel The Hand of Fu Manchu:

All conversation had ceased, when, just as the muted booming of London’s clocks reached my ears again and Weymouth pulled out his watch, there came a faint click – and I saw that Smith had raised the lid of the coffer! Weymouth and I sprang forward with one accord, and over Smith’s shoulders peered into the interior. There was a second lid of some dull, black wood, apparently of great age, and fastened to it so as to form knobs or handles was an exquisitely carved pair of golden pomegranates!

“They are to raise the wooden lid, Mr. Smith!” cried Weymouth eagerly. “Look! there is a hollow in each to accommodate the fingers!”

“Aren’t you going to open it?” I demanded excitedly – “aren’t you going to open it?”

This is not Nayland Smith’s first time at the rodeo. Smith, who is a sort of racist anti-Chinese version of Sherlock Holmes, notes a subtle clue: a dead man next to the chest.

I examined the peculiarity to which Smith had drawn my attention. The dead man’s fingers were swollen extraordinarily, the index finger of either hand especially being oddly discolored, as though bruised from the nail upward.

“Look into these two cavities where one is expected to thrust one’s fingers!” Weymouth and I craned forward so that our heads came into contact.

“My God!” whispered the Inspector, “we know now what killed him!” Visible, in either little cavity against the edge of the steel handcuff, was the point of a needle, which evidently worked in an exquisitely made socket through which the action of raising the lid caused it to protrude. Underneath the lid, midway between the two pomegranates, as I saw by slowly moving the lamp, was a little receptacle of metal communicating with the base of the hollow needles. The action of lifting the lid not only protruded the points but also operated the hypodermic syringe!

I wouldn’t be too surprised if this passage inspired the ubiquitous poison-needle chest in D&D. I’d be even less surprised if this passage inspired a poison-needle chest in some 1960s pulp sci-fi/fantasy, and that inspired the D&D version.

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