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
Old-school elves are surprisingly good candidates.
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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.
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
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.
Who, or what, is named Bright?
My first thought is that it’s an ironic name for something dark. Maybe there’s an assassins’ guild where every assassin’s on-the-job pseudonym is Bright, the way clients are all named Johnson in Shadowrun.
Hmm… that’s OK, but maybe it feels a little too much like an acronym, like THRUSH from Man from Uncle or KAOS from Get Smart.
Any other ideas?
(By the way, my group recently played a game of Shadowrun where my character was a Russian celebrity. The GM decided that my client was named Ivanovich. If that’s an old gag, it’s new to me.)
So, several years after 4e came out, how is “+1 to everything every two levels” level bonus working out for everyone?
Every time you gain an even level, you have to do a lot of writing on your character sheet (or, more likely, print out a new sheet). You have to add the +1 level bonus to the attack rolls on all of your power cards, add 1 to your defenses and initiative, and update every. single. skill.
I’m starting to wonder whether you couldn’t scrap this level bonus, and just let characters’ abilities climb based on attribute boosts, enhancement bonuses, and other perks.
The level bonus has NO EFFECT on level-appropriate challenges, since the bonuses are applied to attacks and defenses (or skill bonuses and DCs). The main effect of the bonus is to make levels more meaningful. If characters or monsters have a few levels between them, they can’t reasonably compete against each other. Does this make things more fun? Let’s examine every aspect of the level-bonus rule separately.
Attack rolls and defenses: These march in lockstep, so let’s examine them together. The design intent of 4e was that monsters’ defenses would increase by 1 point every level; PC attacks would also increase by 1 every level, .5 from the level bonus and .5 from everything else (ability bonuses, enhancement bonuses, and misc etc). (In fact, the original math was slightly wrong, which means that we’re saddled with the Weapon Expertise fix.)
I don’t actually love the rapid increase of attack bonuses and defenses. Experience with 4e shows that it tends to make the most exciting fights – those against high-level opponents – drag on through miss after miss.
Is that really a fun way to handle a very tough battle? No, it isn’t, as 4e designers recognized. That’s why they developed Elite and Solo monsters, who have the increased HP and damage output of higher-level opponents, but the attacks and defenses of level-appropriate opponents.
What if we removed the level bonus from PC attacks and defenses? (We’d also have to subtract 1 point per two levels from monster attack bonuses and defenses.) Higher-level monsters would still have more HP and do more damage than lower-level foes, but their defenses wouldn’t recede quite as fast into unhittability. We’d effectively be turning every high-level monster into something more like an Elite or Solo monster.
Also, does it make fantasy-logic sense that powerful enemies are unhittable? Maybe a little bit – ogres with thick skin or fast duelists are hard to hurt. But an orc champion might not be much dodgier than an orc grunt. He can just take more damage, and behead you before you get a second attack.
Let’s try removing it!
A level 1 fighter with a +7 attack bonus (+4 strength, +3 weapon proficiency) attacks a level 8 orc. Without the level bonus, the orc’s AC is maybe 18 instead of 22. The PC hits on a 11 or better, instead of a 15 or better.
The orc strikes back! Instead of having a +13 attack bonus, he has a +9, so he hits the fighter’s AC 18 with a roll of 9 instead of needing only a 5.
Suddenly, instead of having a dull, foregone-conclusion combat round, we have some excitement around the combat rolls. Of course, the orc is still going to win the combat, because he hits like a jackhammer. His attacks still do an average of 16+ damage per attack, meaning he can bloody the fighter with one hit: while the fighter, doing possibly 9 or 10 damage per hit, is going to take a while to carve through the orc’s 90 HP. This, to me, seems like a more exciting way to model a one-sided battle.
Skills
Character skill bonuses get higher as characters gain levels, which makes sense: higher-level characters are more competent. However, the current 4e skill paradigm is that skill DCs are relative to the characters’ level anyway. A Hard climb check is always a Hard climb check, no matter the character level: there are only a handful of fixed DCs, like those for jump distance, at which higher-level characters actually improve.
If characters always face level-appropriate skill DCs, what’s the point of laboriously adding 1 to every skill bonus and DC every two levels? Let’s just forget that rigmarole and let PC skills slowly improve as they accrue attribute bonuses and skill-boosting items. We’ll subtract half-level from the giant skill DC chart as well.
This change has no downside (since it actually has virtually no mechanical effect at all), and would save a lot of erasing/reprinting of the character sheet.
Initiative
Since initiative rises steeply with level, it becomes an inevitable part of combat that higher-level opponents go before you. Does this make any sense? Why does a high-level zombie, with a speed of 4, necessarily beat you to the punch?
Also worth noting are the important areas where the level bonus is not used:
Damage Although, for instance, Strength checks and Strength-based skills increase by one point every two levels, Strength-based damage does not (which confused me when I started 4e, and probably confuses other new players). Damage increases are, instead, cooked into attacks: higher-level attacks let you roll more dice.
Hit points Characters and monsters get HP per level via a separate subsystem. The extra HP and damage given to monsters and characters, plus the non-level bonuses to other attributes, might make for more entertaining encounters between opponents of different level.
Last week we started work on the Mazes and Monsters combat system, figuring out HP and damage. That was the easy part: hit rolls are really the central feature of combat.
Let’s use RONA for this. As you may remember, using RONA, you roll a D12 and try to hit a target number. If you have an applicable trait, you roll 2d12 and take the highest number.
Wimpy monsters require an Easy Rona (a roll of 3 or more on an exploding d12); middle-range monsters Average (6) and tough or well-armored foes Hard (9).
Characters don’t necessarily get much better at hitting as they level. As soon as they get a trait that lets them roll 2d12 for their attack, they’re as good as they’ll ever be.
This is a departure from fantasy RPGs like D&D, which give the PCs (and monsters) steadily increasing hit chances as they level. Mazes and Monsters, on the other hand, provides steadily increasing damage; we don’t need to double-dip.
Armor
Armor in Mazes and Monsters is very limited! Iglacia the Fighter has listed among her possessions “armor”, “shield”, and “helmet”. No “leather”, “chain”, or “plate”; no armor+1. Just “Armor”.
Let’s say that hitting an unarmored character requires an Average success: in essence, you need to roll a 6 to hit them. We’ll give each of Armor, Helm, and Shield a +1 to that number, so a fully-armored character like Iglacia requires a 9 to hit: a Hard RONA.
Is there anything on Iglacia’s character sheet to bear out this theory?
Well, there is a stat right below H.P. I can’t make out the acronym: it’s two letters, and its value is 10. If I had to guess, I’d say that the letters were “P.T.” or “T.P.” or “B.R.” or something like that. Since I can’t figure out what it is, I’m going to declare that it’s “P.R.”, “Protection RONA”. It’s 10, instead of 9, which gives Iglacia a better defense than we theorized! Maybe Armor grants +2 P.R. while the helm and shield grant +1 each.
Weapons
Iglacia has a couple of weapons on her character sheet: mace, axe, and the Talking Sword of Loghri. She must have had some reason for keeping her mace even after she got her Talking Sword of Logrhi. How are we going to differentiate these weapons?
I’m tempted to adopt the D&D3 solution of giving monsters resistances and weaknesses to bashing, piercing, or slashing weapons. We can extend that to spells, too: maze mummies are weak to fire, for instance.
Actually, given that the only type of armor is “armor”, the list of weapons in Mazes and Monsters probably isn’t very long. No footman’s mace or Bohemian earspoon here. Instead of dividing weapons into categories, we can just give monsters resistances to specific weapons.
While we’re here, let’s come up with the weapons list. It probably looks something like
sword
mace
axe
spear
dagger
bow
staff
Let’s handle monster weaknesses and resistances by adjusting the monster’s P.R. (Protection RONA): +3 for resistances and -3 for weaknesses. For instance:
Mystic Skeleton
PR: 6 (9 vs arrows, swords and daggers)
Maiming and Slaughter
We’ve already come up with a colorful Maiming table. We can now tie that to the RONA system. If you (or a monster) get a critical success (10 higher than the RONA target number) you can roll on the maiming table. If you happen to roll a double crit (20 higher than the RONA) let’s say you kill your target instantly. We’ll call that a slaughter because that’s the sort of term that probably would have distressed 80s parents.
Say, what are the odds of having a character get Slaughtered by a freak roll of the dice?
I tend to think that monsters always roll 1d12s: the extra d12 from Traits are one of the ways that players have an advantage over their environment. In order to Slaughter an unarmored character with a RONA of 6, a monster needs a 26. That means rolling 12 twice, and then rolling a 6 or higher. The odds of this are about 1 in 300.
How many times is a character attacked between level 1 and level 9? Well, earlier we decided that it takes 70 game sessions to get to level 9. Let’s conservatively guess that there are two combats per session. Unarmored characters try to stay out of the way, but they probably get attacked at least once per battle. Over 9 levels, that’s about 300 attacks: you’ve got an even chance of being Slaughtered before you get to level 10. Add to that the chances of death by HP depletion, traps, tricks, and Maze-related madness, and it’s obviously quite an accomplishment to make it to the level-10 cap.
Fumbling
If there’s a special chart for critical hits, there needs to be a chart for critical failures too. If you roll ten less than a target Protection RONA, you have to roll on the Fumble Chart.
Fumble Subtable
1: The character impales himself with his or another’s weapon. Character rolls damage on himself.
1: The character makes the same attack again, this time on an ally.
3: The character’s weapon or spell breaks.
4-5: The character’s weapon or spell flies across the room.
6-7: The character leaves himself open. One opponent may make a free attack.
8-9: The character falls down. He loses his next turn.
10-11: The character misses spectacularly. No other effect.
12: If there is another enemy in range, the character automatically hits that enemy.
On a double fumble (20 lower than the target’s P.R.) the character kills himself with his own weapon.
OK, our combat system is pretty solid. We maybe erred in basing it on the same mechanic as everything else in the game; to maintain fidelity to 80’s RPG style, we should have had it be a whole separate subsystem. But at least we jammed in a few unnecessary charts.
Next week we’ll finish off whatever odds and ends of rules we haven’t addressed yet. The Mazed condition springs to mind. Then, the week after: the official release of Mazes and Monsters 1st Edition, just in time for Christmas!
Edit: We won’t do that. Instead, next time: we’ll get mazed!
One type of common artifact found in the Zimbabwe ruins was “perforated clay disks”. Archaeologists believe they were spinning wheels, but “they could have other uses.”
African Civilizations by Graham Connah
When you spin the disks, using some wood and string contraption (sold separately), the disks emit a ghostly wail. When spun at the right speed, they allow communication with the dead.
Why, then, are there so many of the disks, found all over the ruin? You’d think you’d only need a couple, probably found in the temple.
Perhaps every reasonably rich person has a personal clay disk made, which is keyed to the owner’s voice. After someone’s death, his or her loved ones can ask them important questions “Who killed you? Do you love me? Who gets the armoire?” for a few days before the person’s soul journeys on.
The people who lived in this ruin must have been really into ancestors and death. They’re starting to sound like dwarves. Yeah, gotta be dwarves.
Sometimes in D&D the stupidest ideas are the most delightful. Amusingly, they are often still the most stupid.
In my last D&D session, 3 members of the party were sneaking around a Keep inhabited by Giants looking for the phylactery of a lich we believed might be hidden there. They were going down a corridor when ambling along came a strong giant woman carrying a massive tureen filled with piping hot lamb soup.
The person playing the Kobold Rogue turned to the rest of the party and asked, “Should I jump into the soup?” Read the rest of this entry »
James Mal has proposed an OD&D gameplay principle: D&D is always right. In other words, if you find an apparent contradiction or nonsensical rule, give it the benefit of the doubt and restructure your gameplay expectations to justify it. I think of this as similar to the fandom practice of creating explanations for apparent errors: for instance, if Star Wars is Always Right, you get to come up with a fun explanation for why the Millenium Falcon can do the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs.
This can be a fun practice, and often leads to interesting and quirky world details that make it seem like a living place.
Here’s another principle: Ceremony is Always Right.
Real old-time superstitions, rituals, and beliefs about magic should be a great source for worldbuilding quirkiness. Assume that any ceremony or ritual is not just ignorant superstition, but has a part in making the world the way it is.
I talked about funeral practices being necessary for speeding souls on their way. The same priests who do funerals probably do weddings too.
weddings in D&D
A wedding’s main function is for legitimizing heirs, right, for inheritance? Besides the legal penalties, what is the magical significance of being born out of wedlock?
I think medieval bastards were perceived as chaotic force. They have no claim on the lifestyle they’re born to. If they want to get anything, they need to upset the social order to get it, like Edmund in King Lear. What if bastard babies have a chance of being possessed by a demon, or being swapped for a changeling or something? A demon-possessed or changeling child will grow up with the goal of disrupting the family, either by seizing power or just killing everybody.
In ancient days, when demons ruled, demon spirits possessed maybe one in 10 children. The wedding ritual, which protects the children of a marriage, was one of the turning points in the war against the demons.
We’ve pretty much gotten a complete RPG out of Mazes and Monsters, and now we’re putting together the final pieces. In a total reversal of normal RPG design, we’re putting together the combat rules last!
For reference, here’s Iglacia the Fighter’s character sheet:
Page 1:
click for larger version
Page 2:
Combat System
For our combat rules, we need something baroque, something byzantine, something a little quirky.
Sure, we could just abstract combat, make it an instance of the general action resolution mechanic, the way modern, non-combat-oriented games do: but this is the 80s. This is a game called MAZES AND MONSTERS. It’s about fighting monsters and stealing their treasure (and working out your neuroses along the way). It needs detailed combat rules, preferably with charts.
We already know some details about the combat system. The Columbo-like detective said it featured “maiming”. We know that characters have Hit Points (dozens or hundreds of them). From the way that Tom Hanks stood between the muggers, we can guess it doesn’t feature flanking or tactical movement. And from the lethality of traps, I’d guess that combat in Mazes and Monsters can be a fairly deadly affair.
Combat rules can be reduced to four pieces: Hit Points, Damage rolls, Hit Rolls, and Defenses. We’ll take the first two today.
Hit Points
At level 9, Iglacia the Fighter has 181 HP. An awkward number: approximately 20 HP per level, but off by one. It seems that there is some random die rolling involved. And in Mazes and Monsters, if there’s die rolling, there are d12s.
We could use our exploding die rolls here, but it doesn’t seem reasonable that someone could roll a negative number for hit points. Imagine a first-level character who starts with -5 HP! I mean, this is the 80s, the decade of death during character creation, but let’s avoid that little headache and have HP rolls be regular d12 rolls.
The average roll of 3d12 is 19.5; if fighters roll 3d12 per level for HP, a 9th level fighter would average 175.5. Iglacia’s 181 is perfectly reasonable, especially considering that players’ HP scores trend high. There’s a long RPG tradition of cheating on your hit-point rolls.
D&D-like games usually have tiers of classes, toughness-wise: for instance, Basic D&D gives fighters d8s for Hit Points, clerics d6es and magic-users and rogues d4. Advanced D&D inflated things up to d10 for fighters, and then gave d12s to barbarians, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We’ll introduce power creep in later supplements. For now, let’s give tough classes, like Fighters, 3d12 HP per level; and weaker classes, like Holy Men and Frenetics, 2d12 HP.
What about monsters? I don’t know about you, but rolling 27d12 to generate the Hit Points of a 9th-level monster doesn’t sound very fun to me. Let’s give monsters static HP by level.
Monsters, to my mind, come in two tiers: melee monsters and ranged. Let’s give melee monsters 20 HP per level (similar to fighters in toughness) and ranged monsters 10 HP per level (a little less than Holy Men and Frenetics).
Damage Rolls
You can derive average damage from average HP by answering the following question: all things being equal, how many hits can a hero take? and dividing accordingly.
I get the sense that Mazes and Monsters is a deadly game. However, as our friends prove, it is possible to get to level 9, so the odds are stacked towards the smart player!
My guess – based on the same instinct that led me to peg spell points at 20 per level and spells at 10 spell points per level – is that, on average, a fighter can take maybe two solid hits: but I wouldn’t be surprised if a monster can one-shot a player with a good enough damage roll.
Let’s start with two types of attacks, Weak attacks and Strong attacks.
Weak attacks – like a sprite’s dagger, or an ogre’s sling – do exploding 1d12 damage times the attacker’s level. (It’s a great way to learn your times table!)
Average damage for a weak attack is 5.5 HP per level, while fighters have an average of around 20 HP per level. On average, Iglacia the fighter can take 4 Weak hits from 9th-level adversaries before being killed.
Strong attacks – like a sprite’s bow, or an ogre’s club – do exploding 2d12 damage times the attacker’s level.
Two Strong attacks from a 9th level opponent will kill Iglacia. One such attack has almost a 50% chance of dropping Pardieux. He’d better only resort to front-line fighting as a last resort! He’d better rely on his spells, or on reason.
Next week, let’s figure out hit rolls, armor, weapons, and all that jazz. Then we’ll have a complete combat system.
