Dark Souls: Recovery and Exploration

One thing I particularly enjoy about Dark & Demon's Souls is that they are under no obligation to explain how being impaled only lowers your HP by so much.  The characters are already dead, either as phantoms, hollow zombies or soulless bodies so physical punishment and pain are negligible.  That said I particularly like how Dark Souls handled healing and ditched the clumsy method in Demon's Souls.

Demon's Souls allowed you to heal by eating various kinds of lunar grass, each restoring a larger swath of HP.  Grazing took a very long time so doing so in combat could easily leave you open for some prime-time-skewering.  Grass was often hard to find early on but in some levels where delicious moon grass was overflowing you got to the point where your character could be permanently stocked and at full HP whenever he finishes a skirmish.  Sound familiar?  Sounds like a Wand of Cure Light Wounds (CLW) with plentiful charges to me.  The 4th edition of the worlds most popular roleplaying game decided to get around this by giving out personal healing surges (which also set a cap on how many potions one could quaff) and an extended rest that fully healed everyone.  In addition it introduced a milestone system that encouraged you to press on rather than full healing after every fight creating a 5 minute adventuring day.  Rife with flaws it did try to address the problem.  Dark Souls does this one better.  Allow me to explain.

Remedying Action Hero Syndrome Part 3. Revelation

In this segment I'm going to talk about how I've been working with the party's Barbarian who takes great pride and pleasure in his continuing and intentional idiocy.  If you've been reading the Campaign Recaps for the Temple of Elemental Evil you may already be familiar with Bronan the Barbarian.  The surly Dwarf frequently gets himself in over his head (no pun intended) and has no expectation of getting himself pulled out of trouble.  It's not a death wish, just someone who wishes for a very comical series of hijinks.  A comedic guy myself I don't mind playing along but sometimes you need to reel them in.  I've accomplished this in two ways, a voice-of-reason scene recaps and in-game mechanics.  Disclaimer: This is and previous installments are not a one size-fits-all approach.  It merely works for me and you are welcome to use some of the philosophy behind this.

Reel em in, but don't pull so hard you break the line

Remedying Action Hero Syndrome Part 2

Last time I looked at possible causes for why the newer crop of players have wildly different mindsets than the grey bearded crowd.  A lot of it conjecture and anecdotal but if you get a chance take a look and see if any of it rings true.  This time I'd like to take a look at what I call remedying action hero syndrome.  What I often read on other OSR blogs is that the best way to show someone the way to play and old school game is to let them fall, let them die and eventually they'll learn their lesson.  Sure we instruct them to read Matt Finch's Primer first but for the most part we're letting them jump out the nest before their feathers have even come in so its not surprising when they fail miserably and often quit with negative perceptions of that style of play.  I'd like to explain how I try to handle things, through a much more gradual acclimation.

Remedying Action Hero Syndrome

A lot of trouble I've run into with players whose first introduction to the game is with third or fourth edition, or those that have never played before but were raised on a steady diet of single hero action adventure and RPGs on their console of choice.  In these particular games, and in fourth edition in particular player characters have a certain level of expected invulnerability.  These expectation continue in game design where a common assumption is that encounters should be matched to the power level of the players, that things should be fair.  Anyone playing an Old school or OSR game will know that is almost always never the case.

There's actually a good thread over on ENworld talking about expectations between tactical and strategic.  Mainly whether you treat combat as war or combat as sport.  In an old school game your goal is to get as many advantages as you can using resources through the gameworld.  In a newer edition (sport) you are assembling advantages through the rules-set and less emphasis is placed on accruing in-game advantages.  It's a long and very well thought out thread I suggest you check it out and it's successor.

Dark Souls: Fantastic Vistas

As I emphasized in the previous post Dark Souls is an electronic game that most closely emulates the feel of old school D&D.  It is simple yet contains a great deal of depth, the more effort you put into learning to control it and understanding the inner workings of its world the more you will benefit and the easier you can progress.  As a longtime DM I find the idea of not just mechanics, but basic gameplay that motivates the players to become more engaged with handling their characters but most especially learning about the world you've created to be a very fascinating and coveted concept.  One way Dark Souls approaches this is simply the scenery and setting and the gorgeous vistas you can reach if you simply pay attention.

Dark Souls: Play Smarter (Play Cautiously)

Quote by Bruce Lee

Dark Souls makes no qualms about being a difficult game.  The world is dangerous and it wastes no time in telling you that.  It is a series where dying is a fact of life but also of gameplay.  You play either as a soul trapped within the Nexus beneath the confines of the Arch Demon ravaged world ala Demon's Souls.  Alternatively in Dark Souls you play as one cursed by undeath seeking to restore your humanity and rekindle the fire left in the world.  Dying is expected of you as it is deeply ingrained into these settings.  Those that die too often, that lose their humanity become hollow twisted versions of themselves, even NPCs can fall victim to this.  Death is not the end of the world.  Instead dying teaches you; it teaches you not to make that mistake again.  Should you possess the skill and the patience to return to where you perished you may reclaim all the souls (universal experience and monetary unit) and humanity (universal gameplay unit) that you had lost.  In this respect you are encouraged to keep playing, to get back to where you slipped up and start again without having starting anew.  Death does not impede progress, it makes you more prepared for what else awaits in your journey.  Death is the key to becoming great and fulfilling your destiny.  Death will force you to be smarter, and you will grow to be very cautious.

Swift Death from the upcoming Dark Souls 2

Abiliy Mod Inflation

Brendan over at Untimately referred me to this post when I was talking about ability checks and saving throws (and possibly mixing the two) over at Roger the GS' post about Vancian Magic (I've a post on that matter as well but all in due time).  While I still plan on doing an extensive writeup on ability checks and saving throws and merging the two, it will have to wait until I've collected my thoughts and sifted through the labyrinth that has become my notes.  This time I'm going to talk about ability mod inflation, my experience with them and possible solutions I've tried.

Crunch Time Results

Crunch time was a worthy endeavor.  Although I did not manage to fulfill all the goals I set out to these last few hectic days I still have the motivation to keep going and that's what is important.  As I mentioned previously I hadn't updated my formal draft in a while and instead stuck to my increasingly disorganized notes.  Part of the reason is layout, the other part was that I had to take care of a major rewrite of a core section of the system.  Until I did I didn't feel comfortable adding anything else while something so important was left broken and scattered.  I fixed that section, I rewrote it from scratch at least half a dozen times and I wasn't sure I'd ever make progress on it but I persevered.   I'm sure there's more necessary revisions to be done but I'm glad, because now I have something working, something that resembles what I originally set out to do.  Now, I can continue adding reworking now that I've slain this latest beast.  No longer does that insurmountable feeling hold me able fingers back, I can start writing anew and that made this an important hurdle to cross.

Also, I really enjoyed posting everyday, although I certainly didn't have the time for it.  I think it's something to strive for in the future.  Well, provided I have anything to write about!

Armor Class VS Weapon

Despite hitting the hay a bit early last night (and tossing up a reserve post to maintain my crunch time post quota) I've made a substantial bit of progress.  I've added all the revisions, rewrites and new material since my original draft many moons ago.  All I have left for now is the equipment section and a few clarifying sections for the basic prototype.  Now that I've spoken of my success let me share one of my more recent failures.

A while back I was reading a post over on Delta's D&D Hotspot that was referencing a posting over at myArmory forums about a gentleman who decided to test some authentic or equivalent medieval weapons against cheaply made chainmail as well as a handcrafted set of the highest quality.  It's an excellent posting and experiment be sure to check it out when you have the time.  The test showed how different European weapons, as well as a katana thrown in to highlight a few differences, would perform against the most common of medieval armors, chainmail and jack (layered textile most closely related to brigadine.)  The tests provided some excellent insights and I thought I might veer more towards simulation side of game taxonomy [1] for my weapons system.  Mind you, this was before people declared with great fortitude their staunch distaste for weapons vs armor class in Jeff Rient's poll. Furthermore, I had already taken a stab at this before and the results were more trouble than they were worth.  Still I was sure this time would be different.

Crunch Time

Back on New Years I had made a resolution to get a working prototype done by Febtober, jokingly indicating that I wanted something done by February that could easily be dragged out till October using an old SNL Celebrity Jeopardy Reference.  Well, February has come and almost gone and I think I'd like to push myself these last three days.  Get all the new additions and revisions from playtesting down onto a hard copy rather than pushing it off even further.  To keep me in the mood and keep inspiration flowing I'm pledging at least one post per day.

To start I'd like to extoll the virtues of Notepad++.  When I first started working on my system, well before I even decided to do an independent system, I was writing down some thoughts here and there in a simple text document.  When I wrote up my original draft I put it in a full blown word processor, and later on I put that into Scribus, an open source desktop publishing application I was experimenting with.  Well if I may say, the worst part of writing an rpg system is the layouts.  Seriously.  Having something fit perfectly on one page is wonderful, having something be too long is painful as you try to cut content you felt was perfect or already tightly woven.  It's even worse when you have a new idea or a revision and you need to add something but it regrettably pushes you over your limit.  So word to the wise, save the fancy programs until you're ready to print and until then write to your heart's content and don't care about page counts or fitting in dense pockets of information.  You can cut and curtail that later in the revision process but that brings me to notepad++.

Since word-processors and desktop-publishers were a pain in the ass for adding in revisions and new content, both technically and psychologically, I had gone back to the good old notepad which was ballooning in size by this point.  I even split some off into separate text documents for various classes and core systems but that got a little unwieldy, especially when you're working off an archaic laptop with a small screen and an inability to multitask.  Notepad++ lets you view your text documents like you would in a modern code compiler, it's clean and streamlined and best of all you can open up all those tributary text documents at once and quickly switch between them through tabs (like a modern web browser).  It's lightweight and easy to use and I cannot recommend it enough even for the smallest of things.

Class Kits on the Fly

The last time I ran a D&D game I ran a slightly modified Labyrinth Lord.  There were three available classes, Fighter, Rogue & Cleric/Cultist.  There were no Wizards on account of them all being wiped out in a cataclysmic event in the setting.  However, that same cataclysmic event also endowed every sentient creature with the ability to cast arcane spells.  Essentially, everyone was multi-classed Wizard at no penalty and the only spells you knew were from the scrolls you picked up.  Scrolls were not consumables but rather represented your own personal library of spells.  I'm going to list the three classes and my slight modifications below.


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Fighter
Originally I gave the Fighter a "Master of Battle" ability that allowed them to attack as many hit dice as the fighter had levels.  So a 5th level fighter could attack two 2HD creatures and one 1HD creature, or three 1HD and one 2HD, etc.
Getting the wording right was a bit awkward so I've been leaning towards the old chainmail rule where they can make an attack for each HD they had.  Meaning that 8HD superhero could make 8 attacks.  For simplicities sake if multiple attacks are made against the same target it is resolved with one die roll and you roll as many dice as required (3 attacks -> one to hit roll and 3 damage dice).

Fighter's also had a variant of AD&D's weapon specializations and the optional Naked Warrior Rule.

Rogue
"Stunt - Anytime the Thief viscerally describes some crazed stunt they'd like to perform such as swinging across chandeliers, using a silver platter as an impromptu shield, riding an enraged stag by the horns, or jumping out windows in their best Bruce Cambell impression they receive a stunt bonus to the die roll equal to 1 + half their level. This bonus can be applied to just about any roll involving a d20 (attacks, saves, skill/ability checks) as well as for damage rolls and reaction rolls."


The only thing I would change now is that it gives a bonus to damage/reaction dice rather than a simple  modifier.

Cleric
I had previous used a Judge's Guild optional rule that allowed character to regain d3 HP at the end of combat. Originally I was going to replace the d3 with the class HD but I decided to forgo all variable dice for that game (d6's for everybody!).  Instead at the end of combat a cleric would have the party roll 2d6 and take the higher value as HP regained.

This ability proved to be quite powerful and could lead to near infinite adventuring (not necessarily a bad thing).  There was a bit of a disconnect as well because after a battle a party could end up with more hit points than what they started with.  To rectify this I'm going to try out a system I'm rather proud of which should eliminate disconnect altogether.  If it works well I'll keep it in the beta version of my game system.

Cleric's could also spontaneously cast Cure spells.

Cultist
These crazy fools worshiped the Shrike, also known as the pain lord, an inscrutable being made of free-flowing metal and spikes that travels backwards through time.  If you've read the Hyperion Novel's by Dan Simmons you should be familiar.

At first level I decided to give the Cultists an ability related to the Pain Lord's effect on time and entropy.  The best I could come up with would be to affect group initiative and I decided to go with their enemies.  It wasn't particularly powerful (although the Cleric's ability would end up being) but it was by far the player's favorite.

Entropic Adjustment: When rolling initiative enemy groups must roll twice and take the lower result.

Cultist's could also spontaneously cast Inflict spells.
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The guiding principle behind these class touch-ups was that the ability granted would either improve with them as they level (Fighter and Rogue) or it would provide a set benefit that was useful at all levels of play and they would receive separate abilities later on that would build on the theme of the class (Cleric/Cultist).  As an example at level 10 the Cultist was going to be able to take two actions per round with the downside that his permanently hasted body would lead to a very early demise.

Now I've taken the time to repost these class tweaks and analyse them for a reason.  The next time I run a D&D/LL game I plan on using Class Kits.  For those unfamiliar, a kit was a way to customize or create a variant of a class.  The fighter could be a berserker or a kensei, a ranger could be a beast master or an archer, a bard could be a blade or skald, a cleric could have a kit based on his god which would later grow into the Domain abilities introduced in 3.x.  The kits were a nice way to personalize a class without mucking around too much.  Most of them gave a fairly significant combat modifier or granted some neat ability used a few times a day.  Now, when I say I'm going to introduce kits I'm not actually going to write out a bunch of kits and pass them around to players since it's very unlikely that a premade kit will fully envision what the player has in mind.  Instead we'll talk about what kind of character they would like to play and we'll work out the finer details by choosing one of the three class archetypes above and creating the kit on the fly.

Kitting on the Fly

So let's say you want to play a Barbarian or a Berserker.  You start you off as a Fighter and decide they will be limited to Hide armor based on iconic barbarians, berkserkers and vikings.  We also decide that you'll have a rage type ability that boosts your damage, strength checks and capacity to take damage.  Now we may go the route of having it be a set number of times a day or we can have you go berserk at will with the risk of you losing control.  Said risk increases as the battle wears on.  We could also combine the two, where the set number of day represents the number of times you can rage without fear of losing yourself.

How about a Ranger?  He gains a favored enemy, woodland skills and has an edge on surprising creatures.  In exchange he'll lose the specialization of the fighter and have a more restricted armor choice.

Seems simple enough right?    Grant an advantage or two and add a few defects.  In the above examples the Berserker's ability came with it's own disadvatage, losing control, while the ranger had to give up a powerful class feature, their starting weapon specialization.  Let's try a few more.

Want to make a Spellsword type Gish?  Sure, you're a fighter with an offensive wizard spell list that can cast through their blade, with shocking grasp represented by electrified steel or activating burning hands while your sword misses in a wild arc producing a fan of flames.  The spell list is restricted to offensive spells and they cannot wear armor heavier than leather or mithril/elven chain.

Want to play Gygax the level 27th level warrior mage?  {My apologies in advance for the annoying sound effects inserted.}  Sure, you're a Wizard in heavy armor with a mostly defensive spell set.

In the first case you are gaining an ability, discharging spells through your sword, with the disadvantage of a restricted spell list.  Being able to cast in armor is balanced by the limited armor selection.  The battlemage on the other hand retains his armor selection and spell casting but forfeits the bread and butter of spell repertoire. Since in this particular game anyone can pick up a scroll or wand so the addition of the Wizard's spell list is a relatively minor modification.

Now I haven't laid any actual groundwork here for a reason.  I'd rather provide examples in place of guidelines because even an easy heuristic like 1 advantage for every disadvantage can become clunky when you begin weighing the benefits, frequency of use, an significance of abilities against each other.  Plus, examples serve as kindling for the imagination and you may have thought of a few kits of your own by the time you read this.

If you'd like to try this yourself make sure you work with your players and create something that is not immediately unbalanced and everyone agrees would be fun to play.  Always remember, what may seem fine on paper may absolutely wreck things in actual play.  And of course the opposite can also hold true.

Doomed to Repeat; Creative Urges

Been a while since I've posted an update.  Here's what I've been working on.

My players and I grew frustrated with Saint Sage Edition since we were coming from some fast and loose systems.  Moving back to the structured, "There's a DC for that.  There's always a DC for that" was a bit of a wake up call.  As much as I love Sage Edition I'm beginning to realize that I love it for being a great d20 system and thus a great D&D system.  Thematically I don't think Star Wars and 20 levels really coincides.  With that in mind we came up with a very agreeable solution.  All the players love SW Minis.  I personally love it for it's simplified approach of taking the "Keep It Sweet and Simple" design approach of Sage and further boiling it down.  Abilities are useful, rather than roadblocks on the way to power.  Many abilities are resolved with a simple saving throw.  A Saving throw is always 11!  Talk about ease of use, this is a terrific rule of thumb (later expansions would add in Save of 6 or 16 but all it's really doing is adding or subtracting +5).  That single rule  I love so much I decided to adapt Static Save DC's for my own games.

So I began the task of going through the glossary and rules of Star Wars Minis to create a playable RPG system.  I'll talk more about that in a follow up post.


I've also been working on transcribing my thoughts to my over-burgeoning text documents.  From there I've been taking barebones systems and trying to create a rough draft of my games.  I'm of the opinion that at some point you need to start writing things down in a coherent fashion or you'll never make progress.  Things have been slow going so far.  I'll never marginalize the work of a copy editor again.  There is nothing more agonizing than taking well worded paragraphs and putting them on the chopping block to make a coherant idea fit on a single column or page.

Currently, I'm working on getting the basic combat system down.  Here is where I ran into a bit of trouble and it pertains to anyone interested in design and modification of RPG systems.  I wrote many posts ago about Wounds, the lifeblood of your character.  As opposed to Hit Points these represent actually taking a serious hit, and if you're lucky you can keep on going.  I based the idea (well revised it really) from the Star Wars RCR d20 system where a critical hit could go directly to Wounds.  Thus recreating the Samurai-things can be settled in a sudden stroke- action present in Star Wars.

 The problems were many of course, they decided to keep critical multipliers in, and as you can imagine doubling 2d8 plus modifiers will nearly always trump your Constitution score.  In my original revision I merely had criticals go straight to Wounds with no doubling or tripling to speak of.  I reasoned that damage progressed at a rate equal to half your level while Wounds progressed at a rate equal to your level, therefore damage would not out pace Wounds.  Of course this idea has a few holes in it, namely that it is ignorant of damage modifications that come from feat choices or class features but the basic premise was a decent one.

The critical system has gone through some changes since then.  Mostly to rectify the idea that a certain ability score will affect the severity of critical hits.  Also having Armor apply only to damage to wounds as a way to minimize extra rolling.  As I was writing up an example in the Critical section I was blindsided by the conclusion.  A man wearing decent armor would still be flat out killed by a man with a longsword and a decent damage attribute.  I put it succinctly, "The defender would then receive a whopping 19 Wounds.  At which point he presumably dies."

Here's the lesson.  This goes out to everyone who likes to propose changed to their RPG system of choice.
"Rules do not exist in a vacuum.  Remember that even the smallest changes can have far reaching consequences on the overall balance of the system."

As someone who decided to design a core system from scratch after coming to the conclusion that tinkering with an existing system to make it work was more trouble than it was worth, I had hoped that lesson would have stuck with me.  Now then, it's time to look into solutions.