confirming crits

November 30th, 2012

One of the first D&D houserules I encountered was the “crit to kill” rule: if you roll a natural 20 on an attack, roll another d20. On a second 20, the guy dies.

In Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World, I found a reference to a 1975 ancestor of that houserule, published in 1975 by Gary Switzer, the guy who wrote the first version of the Thief class. Peterson says, “On each melee swing, the attacker rolls an additional d20, which if it scores a ‘0’ (bearing in mind that early d20s had two 0’s), results in a critical. It is the main attack die which determines whether this is a critical hit or a trip—if the attack roll succeeds, then a hit has occurred, otherwise it is a trip.”

That extra die roll never made it into D&D canon, but 3e introduced the idea of “confirming crits:” rolling to see if your natural 20 was really a crit or not. (I think it introduced it. As I’ve mentioned before, my weakness is 2nd edition rules.)

I don’t like any of these rules very much in actual play, but not for game balance reasons. Sure, an insta-kill on 1 in 400 attacks adds wackiness and mitigates against PC survivability, and confirming crits only helps in bizarre corner cases where goblins crit on 100% of hits against dragons. The reason I don’t like them, though, is because they add anticlimax rolls.

In the “crit to kill” variant: You crit! Roll another d20. On a 1-19: Oh well, at least I got a crit. With the confirming a crit rule: I rolled a 20, but failed on the confirmation roll! Oh well, my crit didn’t happen.

4e’s solution was to have a crit always do max damage, and then throw some extra damage dice into the mix. That was not a bad solution: the extra dice always felt like bonus damage, even if you rolled poorly.

I COULD imagine bringing back the “crit to kill” rule in a modified form.

Recently, I’ve experimented with rolling d20s (and even d100s!) for special-effect damage. It’s fun! In my proposed variant, when you roll a crit, you don’t double or max your damage; you throw in a d20 along with all your other damage dice. If that die rolls a 20, you insta-kill. Otherwise, it just adds its damage to your hit (an average of 10 extra damage).

If the 1-in-400 chance of an insta-kill is too silly for you, you could instead make it an exploding d20 roll: on a crit-die roll of 20, you add 20 damage and roll again. Against all but high-level opponents, it will come to the same thing. However, this tweak gives 20th-level fighters some protection against 400 goblin archers.

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Posted in game design, legacy D&D, news, RPG Hub | 6 Comments »

d&d it up for christmas

November 28th, 2012

My Renaissance Man sister Laura is an artist, published author, D&D player, blog of holding commenter, gadabout, and the creator of the prancing elf for my kickstarter stickers. She’s making something you probably need this winter: D&D-themed Christmas cards, available in halfling, orc, dwarf, and elf. All the profits will be going to globalgiving.org, so the cards are like the bonus rewards you get for making a charitable donation.

Obviously you need at least one set, for your D&D group. The question is, is this the year you send D&D cards to everyone, even your grandma?

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5e skills suggestion

November 26th, 2012

In my Mearls D&D game in the sidebar, I’ve been ignoring skills: when someone calls for a Bluff check, I simply make a Charisma check. Since I started playtesting 5e, this has become my favorite way to run a D&D game: the +1 to +4 attribute bonus lends enough weight to a roll without an additional skill bonus.

However, if people want a skill system, you have to have skill bonuses.

4e gave you a +5 bonus for being trained in a skill. +5! If you gave first-level characters +5 swords, that would make a mockery of the combat system. Similarly, a +5 bonus to skills makes a mockery of the skill system.

5e’s skill bonus is +3, which is much more palatable. Still, I’d reduce it another step.

Here are the basic details about the current version of the 5e skill system:
1) +3 for being trained in a skill
2) If you get training in the same skill from two different sources, you choose a different skill. Thus, if a rogue gets Stealth from his class and his background, he gets Stealth and a random skill of his choice.
3) Every even level, you get +1 to a trained skill of your choice.

Here’s my proposed tweak:

1) +2 for being trained in a skill
2) If you get trained in a skill which you already possess, your bonus goes up one point. Thus, a rogue who gets Stealth from his class and background has a +3 Stealth bonus instead of +2.
3) Every even level, you can train a new skill of your choice. That means you can either train a new skill, at +2, or enjoy the fruits of point 2) and increase a skill’s bonus by one point.
4) What the heck, let’s say you can spend your skill point to learn a new language. (How does a language compare to +1 in your favorite skill? Not sure.)

It’s a tiny tweak, but it deflates runaway skill bonuses a tiny bit; allows a mechanism for learning new skills and languages; and provides for a synergy bonus for a focused class/background.

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when inches are inches

November 21st, 2012

OD&D follows the Chainmail convention of using “inches” as a measure meaning 10 feet (in a dungeon) or 10 yards (outside). This isn’t explained up front: in Book 1, Men and Magic, measurements are just given in inches and you have to deal with it. I like to imagine the sad sap who didn’t have Chainmail and was figuring things out as he read. “Lightly-armored troops can travel 12 inches every ten minutes? Huh. Seems a little slow, but OK.” “The Light spell casts light in a 3 inch diameter? Wow. If it was radius, that would at least be something.”

The actual inches-to-distance conversions are somewhere in book 3. Underground movement is on page 8, in the Move/Turn in the Underworld section: “In the underworld all distances are in feet, so wherever distances are given convert them to tens of feet.” Outside movement is defined (inside parentheses) on page 17, under “Sighting Monsters”: “Players will see monsters at from 40-240 yards (inches convert to tens of yards for the wilderness) unless the monster has surprised the characters involved.”

The poor first-time OD&D reader won’t be skipping around to find this information either, because the Introduction admonishes the reader that volume 3 is presented last “in order to allow the reader to gain the perspective necessary – the understanding of the previous two booklets. Read through the entire work in the order presented before you attempt to play.”

My absolute favorite measurement-related section is the descriptions of the Wall of Stone and Wall of Iron spells (in Book 1, long before the meanings of “inch” are given), where inches (meaning tens of feet) interacts with feet (meaning feet), and also with inches meaning inches:

Wall of Stone: The creation of a stone wall two feet thick with a maximum length and height equalling 10 square inches. The wall will last until dispelled, broken down or battered through as a regular stone wall. Duration: 12 turns. Range: 6″.

Wall of Iron:: Like a Wall of Stone, but the thickness of the wall is three inches and its maximum area 5 square inches. Duration: 12 turns. Range: 6″.

“Huh. Wall of Iron produces 15 cubic inches of iron? Well, since my light footman moves a foot every 10 minutes, I guess it’s useful. How high do you think he can jump?”

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here’s a two weapon fighting implementation

November 19th, 2012

The easiest way to balance two-weapon fighting is to model it on shield use: in other words, give it an almost negligible effect. Still, it should call enough attention to itself that it doesn’t totally disappear on the character sheet.

Here’s an implementation I just thought of:

You can dual-wield if you have a light weapon in your off hand. You make one attack roll.

ADVANTAGES:

You get a +1 to attack.

DISADVANTAGES:

On a hit, you hit with your main-hand weapon if you rolled an even number, and with your offhand weapon if you rolled an odd number.

Analysis:

Let’s leave two-weapon fighting out of the analysis for a minute. Shield vs. two-handed weapon is an interesting trade-off: for (in most editions) +1 AC, you lose 2+ points of damage (going from a d12 to a d8 weapon; possible decrease in strength bonus). It’s really hard to analyze this balance, which changes from edition to edition and from low to high level. But let’s say that this is reasonably balanced, with maybe a slight advantage for the two-handed weapon.

Now let’s throw accuracy into the mix. How does +1 to-hit compare to +1 AC? They’re pretty symmetrical, but I’d say to-hit is a little better. A fighter makes an attack roll nearly every turn, but doesn’t use AC every turn: some enemies use attacks that target other defenses/saving throws.

With my two-weapon implementation, a character trades the +1 AC of a shield for +1 to hit, and pays a small cost in damage to balance it out. With a 50% chance of using your offhand weapon, you’re likely to do 4 damage (average of shortsword and longsword) instead of a shield-user’s 4.5 damage (with a longsword). That cost goes up if you have, say, a +2 longsword in one hand and an ordinary shortsword in the other.

With these three attack styles, you now have a pretty straight tradeoff between the three pieces of D&D combat: damage bonus (2H), AC bonus (shield use), and attack bonus (2WF).

Another fun application of this two-weapon-fighting system: it buffs unarmed fighting. Nearly all boxers fight with both fists, so they get +1 to hit. Based on the die roll, they’ll throw a left hook or a right cross, which, in most cases, won’t matter since both do the same amount of damage.

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have you read Playing at the World yet?

November 16th, 2012

I thought I knew a reasonable amount of D&D history, but after reading Jon Peterson’s Playing At the World, I feel a sort of amused contempt for my past self, that poor ignorant yokel. I no more knew the ingredients of D&D than I did the secret recipe of Coca-Cola. You should read it so you can feel smug too.

Why should a book that’s concerned largely with D&D prehistory be interesting to D&D players? My new favorite author Jon Peterson puts it well: “For all its long-windedness, Dungeons & Dragons is hugely underspecified: many of the core principles of its system are tacit ones, so familiar to the authors that they were blind to the need to record them. Only by a very close reading of the earliest rules, and by placing elements in their proper context in the tradition of wargaming systems, can we even conjecture about the intention behind these ambiguities and omissions. As usual, our familiarity with later versions of the game hinders us rather than helps us; we must forget what the game became in order to discover how and why it got there.”

Here’s how good this book is. Peterson’s book is 720 pages, and while I was reading it, I was constantly wishing it was longer.

This book shed light on a lot of things that I’ve wondered about, sometimes on this blog.

In 2010, I wondered, “What is a midgard?” and wished I could get the rules for one. http://blogofholding.com/?p=265 Now I know a lot about the spread of midgard-style games, the play-by-mail milieu in which they existed, and the reasons that most of them petered out before they really began.

In 2012, I thought, “Look at all these dowels in the Chain Mail rules! That’s cool!” Now I know that the use of dowels to mark altitude comes from the Fletcher Pratt naval game, where “airplane models are attached to a notched pole, where each notch measures a level of elevation at which craft may fly.”

It’s also shocking to see the term “Saving Throw” in Tony Bath’s 1966 medieval combat rules (which inspired Chain Mail). “City militia may only attack heavy infantry if they can throw a 5 or 6. If attacked by them they must throw a 4, 5, 6 to stand, otherwise break and are diced for… If fighting takes place, one throw per 5 men, militia lose half total, no saving throw, cavalry lose one-quarter, saving throw of six.”

There’s lots more good stuff, including many details of Arneson’s original game rules. For instance, Arneson said that “players were not intended to become harder to hit and take more damage as they progress. Instead they were to take the same amount of hits all the time (with the exceptions of spells, magic, etc.) while becoming more talented in inflicting hits and avoiding the same. This has a great equalizing influence.” Imagine a version of D&D where HP stays the same while AC goes up as characters gain levels.

In short: Grab a copy. If you’re a subway commuter reader, like me, get the kindle version: 720 is a lot of pages.

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here’s me for 35 years not knowing about snakewood

November 14th, 2012

Apparently there’s a real thing called a snake-wood tree. Its wood has a wavy grain and it has two or three trunks.

I’m sort of ashamed that I didn’t a) either know about this wood already or b) independently invent it for use in my D&D campaign. Now that I think about it, the existence of something called “snakewood” in a fantasy campaign should be axiomatic.

Here are some corollaries:

  • The Staff of the Serpent is made of snakewood.
  • If you case Sticks to Snakes on snakewood, the spell does not expire.
  • There’s a magic item called a Snakewood Bow. The arrows it fires turn into snakes in flight: on a hit, it lands on, and bites, its target, for 3d6 poison damage (save for no damage). On a miss, the snake lands adjacent to the target: it is alive and hostile, and is a level 1 (or 1 HD) monster. The snake vanishes once it has bitten a target or when it is killed. The Snakewood Bow can fire twenty snake-arrows a day; after that, it acts like a +1 bow.
  • Snakewood walking stick: This looks like a walking stick, not a weapon, but it looks like one that a jerk like Lucius Malfoy would use. It acts as a +1 club. At will, the owner can make it hiss or rattle. The walking stick has three charges, which are refreshed every day. On a melee hit, the owner can expend a charge to have it bite the target: the target must make a fortitude save vs. poison or take 2d6 damage and become Dazed on the next turn.

    Something that the owner of the snakewood walking stick will have to learn from experience: if it’s used to attack a yuan-ti, it will twist and attack its owner, using the attack roll that was intended for the yuan-ti.

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    run your own mearls!

    November 12th, 2012

    I’ve been working on admin tools for my mearls software (the play-by-poll D&D game that we’ve been playing on this site for more than a month now). Now you can start your own mearls: you can either play a private, invitation-only game, or you can run one like mine, where anyone can join in.

    Start your own mearls!

    This is pretty beta at this point. I’d like you to send bug reports, suggestions, requests for clarity, etc to paul at blog of holding dot com.

    If you’d like to embed your mearls in your website, you can use code like
    <iframe src=xxxxx width=250 height=450></iframe> (where xxxxx is the URL of your mearls game).

    I’d like to ask another favor: if you start a game, email me a link to the game! I’ve been DMing for a while and would like to play in a couple of games too.

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    treasure you can’t spend

    November 9th, 2012

    In Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, a character – wait. Are you ready for spoilers? Ready? Ready? Ready? OK, here they come – ends up with a giant shipment of silver bars, each stamped with a symbol indicating its purity. Everyone else believes that silver was sunk at sea. The character is rich – but he can’t figure out how to spend the money. The stamps, which prove the silver’s purity, also indicate its true owner.

    There’s a long D&D tradition of presenting players with logistical challenges along with treasure (“how will I move this fortune in copper coins?”) This might be a fun one for players.

    Imagine a scenario where the players ended up with similarly-stamped bars of silver. Here are the problems they have to face:

    It’s hard for medieval people to exactly determine silver purity. With the stamp, a bar of metal is just as valuable as silver coinage of the same weight. However, honest merchants will not take the metal. Dishonest ones will fence the bars, but take a cut.

    If the metal is melted down or the stamp is cut off, the metal will trade at less than its normal value, since it’s hard to determine whether it’s been mixed with lesser metal. Maybe 75% of its real value? Anyway, how will the players melt down the silver? Silver’s melting point is 1760 Farenheit, much hotter than a campfire. Do the characters own a forge? If they travel to a forge, they’ll have to make sure the stamped treasure avoids inspection. If they scrape or blur the stamp, the bars will still arouse suspicion.

    Players will have no problem coping with these challenges: they’re extremely clever when it comes to matters of profit. Give them the logistical challenge. See what they come up with.

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    new rules for building castles

    November 5th, 2012

    I’ve had a few thoughts about the logistics of PCs building strongholds. There are existing rules for pricing out castlebuilding: OD&D and 1e have their own in the core rules, 2e and 3e have splatbooks, and ACKS has a pretty well-thought-out system. I don’t want to re-invent any of these rules. Instead, I have a few logistical tweaks I think could be added to any of them (to make castle building even more complicated).

    Casting a Castle

    According to the 1e DMG, it takes 2 to 6 years to build a castle. That means that if I began a citadel in 2006 (at the same time as the launch of Twitter, say) it might just be finished now. Some campaigns have five-year chunks of downtime and some don’t: I thought it would be cool if characters in more high-speed campaigns also had a way to build castles. On the other hand, the various castle-building costs shouldn’t be circumvented.

    Here’s a spell/ritual to speed up building:

    Unseen Builders (level 3 wizard spell/ritual)

    This spell creates a host of unseen servants, each of which acts as a laborer. By using this spell, a wizard can condense months of construction into mere days.

    The cost of this spell, in magical components, is exactly the same as the total cost of building the structure without magic, including the cost of materials and human laborers.

    The casting time of the spell is 1/30th of the time it would normally take to build the structure (one day per month). During the multi-day casting of this spell, the wizard works twelve hours a day, can eat and sleep, but can cast no other spells.

    Extra expenses:

    -An architect must be hired to design the building. If the building is to be exceptional, some master craftsmen and artists must be hired as well.
    -The unseen laborers can range as far as 1 mile away from the building site, which usually allows them to fell trees, quarry local stone, and mine a small amount of iron. Any more exotic materials must be gathered at extra expense.
    -Casting this spell is extremely taxing. NPC wizards usually charge an additional 10% to 20% of the cost of the building as their fee.

    Alternate Sources of Stone

    Last week I wrote about the many ancient ruins that clutter the D&D landscape. According to The Medieval Machine, by Jean Gimpel, medieval builders often found it cheaper to tear down existing buildings rather than quarry new stones. Therefore, PCs might end up re-purposing ancient structures, potentially with mystic side-effects. You could make up a chart like this one to determine the closest source of stone:

    Is there an alternate source of stone? (roll d20)
    1 a ruined giants’ castle: cost of building is increased by 25% but every structure has 50% more hit points or other defensive advantages than normal.
    2 A ruin of a high-magic empire: cost of building is reduced by 20%, and the final building is provided with ever-burning torches, doors that open at a password, and other conveniences.
    3 Ruin of a recent empire: cost of building is reduced by 20%.
    4 Holy construction of the ancient gods: if you dare to mine it for stone, the final building is shining white and has 2x normal HP. However, during construction, each worker (or Unseen Builder wizard) will be targeted once by a curse, typically a 10d6 lightning bolt (save for no damage). This is likely to cause an extremely high casualty rate, low morale, delays, 3x or more the normal building costs.
    5 demonic ruin: if you dare to mine it for stone, the final building will be black and jagged, covered with crawling purple runes, and will fire invisible bolts against all attackers as if its walls were fully garrisoned with archers. However, after every 100 nights spent in the building, each inhabitant must make a saving throw or accumulate one neurosis, phobia, or obsession. After 3 such failed saving throws, the inhabitant will go completely mad.
    6 Elven ruin: cost of building is reduced by 20% and everyone compliments you on how beautiful it turned out.
    7 Ruin from the empire of mad archmages: Stone is mined from a Gygaxian death trap. Cost of building is increased by 10%; 5% of the workers are killed by traps or monsters; but mechanical trap construction costs 10% of normal, and you may catch three random monsters for the defense of your structure.
    8 Bizarre ruin: structures are made of lava or skulls or something. Your architect must make an Intelligence check. On a failure, the architect cannot work with this material. On a success, the final structure gains some unique ability.
    9: The local quarry stone is very hard: +10% to building cost and to HP of all structures.
    10: The local quarry stone is soft: either spend +10% building cost on imported stone or the final building has -10% hit points.
    9-18: The closest source of stone is a regular quarry. No effect on prices.
    19-20: Choice of several ruins or quarries nearby. Roll d10 on this chart twice.

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