A to Z Challenge: K is for Kinesis

Adept by JasonEngle

As I may have alluded to in my hastily drawn up posts on Catalysts I treat magic and elementalism a bit differently in my games.   Traditionally in the D&D / Vance spellcasting ethos elemental effects and spells were completely intertwined.  One did not throw fire at someone, they hastily recounted some arcane syllables and sent a tiny mote of fire to explode in a luminous sphere off in the distance.  Elements precipitated from magic.  What I would like to try is elementalism for its own sake without need of a spellcasting prerequisite.

A to Z Challenge: D is for Dragons!

Dragons!  The titular beast of our beloved roleplaying game.  Dragons though have never quite lived up to my expectations as the most fearsome creatures in a manual, bestiary or compendium.  Sure they were huge and powerful but they lacked oomph, longevity and something to set them apart, something other than tacked on spell casting.  If you would like a quick history lesson on Dragon's through the ages, Delta's D&D Hotspot is always happy to provide.  In the very same post he elicited a number of responses on whether or not Dragon's should be granted immunity to missile fire and potentially non-magical weapons.  I am of the opinion that they could use both but others did not see the need to.  So in sprucing up Dragon's we'll add both to the list.  Taichara's Hamsterish Horde has d10 ways of taking your dragon to the next level and many of them are particularly evocative.  Great ideas but I'm looking for something more fundamental to the Dragon, although I must say these variants will certainly be memorable for your players so try them out!

So in order to beef up our particular version of Dragon's let look at what they are most well known for.  Their breath weapon, their size, their flight, their scales, their long lives and equally long slumber.  Here is what I'm proposing:

A to Z Challenge: B is for Belief (Player Chosen Stats)

Today I am fortunate enough to have the A-Z challenge line up with the next post I planned on doing in my Player Chosen Stats series.  In this series I discuss a set of ability scores player's may choose to make their characters more distinct without overcomplicated the quick and easy character creation rules so adored in Original D&D.  The basic premise is addition to the four primary ability scores players could choose two ability scores that best reflected their character's quirks and virtues.    The most noteworthy aspect was that a low score was not necessarily a punishing score opening a lot of room for flawed characters.  Instead a low score functioned in a complementary fashion to advantage granted by a higher score, the detailed version can be found here.  This time we're going to look at Belief.

A to Z Challenge: Armor & Armor Class

A is for Armor and in D&D it is most well known as Armor Class or AC for short.  In typical D&D Armor does not absorb damage but it instead deflects it.  This all or nothing principles has its origin in Iron Clad, a Civil-War battleship rules Dave Arneson worked on then adapted for D&D.  Now I've never been a big fan of this all or nothing approach, it works just fine for a battleship where a shell either pierces the hull or it doesn't but that's not how conventional worn armor works.  A while back during my crunch time posts I talked about one of the failures I had in Armor Class and trying to reverse Weapon vs AC.  A fool's bargain but it was an enlightening experience, now I would like to share the successor to that system which retains what I like most about OD&D's Armor, namely that the type of armor you wore was a class loose enough to be quick and abstracted and specific enough to account for different armor types.

Player Chosen Stats: Courage

Last time I spoke about High and Low ability scores and how I used them in my games.  In addition to the four primary ability scores players could choose two ability scores that best reflected their character's quirks and virtues.    The most noteworthy aspect was that a low score was not necessarily a punishing score, instead a low score functioned in a complementary fashion to the boons of a high score.  In this series I'm going to take a look at each of these optional stats, how I want them to operate and how they were originally represented mechanically.  This time we're going to look at Courage.

High and Low Ability Scores

N. Wright over at Lawful Indifferent has an interesting post on Inverse Ratios specifically the relation between ability scores and magical ability.  In the system he proposes the worse off your standard ability scores are the greater your magical potential is.  It's a neat idea and I've been toying with the idea myself but I'll get to that later.  The really great part of the post is the explanation for why.  You see Magic is an intoxicating and corrupting agent, drawing heavily on the magical forces both weakens the mind and the body. It is not uncommon for a magic-user to have shaking hands, poor focus and a gaunt figure.  Now Wizards as drug addicts doesn't appeal to everyone but I think we can all appreciate it when a game mechanic subtly does a bit of world building for you.  I know I do.  I plan on doing a series on World Building through mechanics and attention to detail but that is time for another day.  In the meantime I'd like to share what I've been doing with giving low scores a purpose which Lawful Indifferent inspired me to take another look at.

The Intrepid Score and Ability Modifiers

From last I spoke I was extolling the virtues of the Intrepid Score.  A seventh stat that allowed hero's to save their bacon from time to time without being an infallible safety net, my take on the oft reviled hero points of many a system.  This time I want to come back to Ability Modifiers and how the Intrepid Score may have solved my problem with Ability Score Inflation.

Intrepid Score

As I was starting to write my post on the convergence between ability checks and saving throws I realized that I was referencing something that I hadn't discussed before.  That would be the Intrepid Score.  The Intrepid Score is a lot like Hero Points in that it allows our intrepid young adventurers brief periods of stardom although the exact method of doing so is a little different.  Let me first start with how the Intrepid score is determined and what it does in mechanical terms before I begin waxing on about its impact on the metagame.

Determining Your Seventh Stat
The Intrepid Score is a measure of your stalwart heroics, it is your seventh stat and is determined randomly.    Fear not though as your Intrepid Score is a resource meant to be depleted in your adventuring day and at the end of each adventure arc your score resets anew.  At the beginning of each arc of an adventure your score resets to zero, you then roll a d6 and add your level to it to determine your new Intrepid Score.
Optional:  If you find the Intrepid Score of a PC does not last as long as you like you may also have the score reset and refresh whenever they level.

Vancian Magic

After yesterday's dreadfully long post I'd like to keep this one short and to the point.  It will also give me time to work on the series of posts I plan on writing about merging Saving Throws and Ability Checks.  In the meantime I'd like to talk a little bit about Vancian Magic.

Jeff Rients asked the community what they would like to see in a magic system that Vancian magic does not promote.  Here are some of the responses that I think particularly stood out:

Adding a bit of Vance to the World

I'm glad I read Vance's Dying Earth last year as it has done wonders for making my world for fantastic and more interactive.  Last week I ran a game in an unspecified world and I decided to inject a bit of Vance into the setting.

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.

Run Zombie Run v0.2

So I've been looking over the zombie run rules I posted way back when and something immediately stuck out.  Of the attributes and skills, there were 5 attributes and 10 skills which could easily be organized into 2 categories:  conflict and patience.  Their names denoting when they are most often used.

So with that I thought what a perfect foundation for randomizing character creation.  And with a zombie apocalypse who knows who you are going to run into!  With that said here are the quick and dirty randomization rules.

Randomized Character Creation

Attributes. (All start at 1)

• Roll a d6 per attribute which corresponds to it's value (up to 5).

• For each 1 subtract 1 from either Panic or Luck. For each 6 add 1 to either Panic or Luck.
• Panic & Luck have a possible value of -5 to 5.

Skills.  (Start at 0)  

• Roll a d6 to see how many possible skills you have.

• Determine how many skills you have in each category. Conflict or Patience.

• Roll a d6 for each skill assigned per category, each skill in a category is labeled from 1-5.
• Roll a 6 and you choose the skill.
• If you roll the same skill twice, roll again or choose a different skill.

• Once your skills have been determined roll a d6 with a 1-5 indicating value, and a roll of 6 allows you to assign one extra point to any other skill on the list.

Zombie Muse

Oh Walking Dead, how I've missed you.

I finally got a chance to catch the mid-season finale as well as subsequent premiere.  I always find that at the end of an episode I'm struggling to understand how quickly the time has gone.  It's very well done, and if you're familiar with the comics, well there's always something new to see.  I'm actually quite glad at how much screentime Shane is getting, he's the perfect foil to Rick's untarnished hero.

Well I'm feeling inspired so it's time I update the Zombie Run rules I posted last year.

3d6 D&D

A while back I decided to try using d6 for everything in classic D&D.  I already used abstract damage (everything was a d6 although I gave twohanders 2d6) and I used d6 for hit points as well, with Fighters, like the ye olde Ranger, getting 2d6 Hit dice.

Now I have heard people mention using 3d6 in place of d20 in the past and I was eager to try it.  I've had many a game night mellow out very quickly because one player could not roll greater than 10 on a d20.  If you're familiar with the math behind the latest two incarnations of D&D, less than 10 is usually a death sentence unless you've walked into the realm of absurd min-maxing synergistic munchkinism.  Well, perhaps that's a bit extreme but it's something I wanted to avoid.  Which is why I was drawn to 3d6 with it's wonderful, truly wonderful bell curve.

I've been using 3d6 for quite some time in my Labyrinth Lord game and I have had zero complaints.  The only time it would come into conflict would be at low levels, where an 18 saving throw is likened unto instant death, to counter that I allowed certain Stat mods to be added to certain saving throws (Dex vs Breath Weapon, Con vs Save or die, and Wisdom already applied to Spells) and fortunately since I had a Dwarf and Treasure Hunter their saves were a bit beefier.  I imagine this would be a problem at much higher levels as well when a Fighter's saving throws are in the realm of 4-6.  This won't be a problem for me in particular since in my games there is a soft-cap at level 10.

I like it enough that I've been testing out using 3d6 in the game system I'm working.  Things have been going well so far but in our most recent playtest I've come to the conclusion that I will need to get rid of ability modifiers.  I've managed to solve most of the problems that would occur in doing so but that's time better spent in a later post.

I should note that I still use d100 for Thief skills.

Class Kitting on the Fly Test Run

Last time I talked about drafting up AD&D-esque class kits on the fly to personalize your player's character.  Here is what my players came up with.  These kits are applied to the the revised three base classes I talked about here.

After the break I'll detail the kits used for Treasure Hunter, Berserker, and Double Agent.

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.

Playtesting Mark 1

With some excruciating work I've managed to finalize the level 1 abilities for 4 of the starting classes.  I've also managed to narrow down what stats I wanted to include and how I would use them and set values for them.  On top of that I had a rudimentary combat system and I was itching to test the new Stamina mechanic, Class features as well as the smoothness of combat.  So a playtesting we go.

In previous posts I've talked about Hit Points, Wounds, Armor and Defense.  Since then I've reevaluated and revised these to make them more elegant.  Since many people's gripe with armor as damage reduction is that it slows down the game and adds unnecessary rolling.  So my solution was to originally have armor affect only your Wounds ignoring HP altogether as hit points represent your ability to not be hit.  This meant that there would be an extra die roll but it would only come up at certain and important times.  Since armor had become slightly marginalized I decided to swap from differing dice sizes to different amounts of dice, adopting a 1d6/2d6/3d6 spread for light, medium and heavy armor respectively.

Of course things didn't stop there, I started thinking about people who had little in the ways of Defense (the first of three lines of defense before imminent death) who would prefer to wear heavy armor.  In this case their HP would quickly be chewed through before reaching Wounds at which point their armor would kick in.  To this I proposed two solutions.  The first was that you could voluntarily have faith in your armor and allow an attack to go straight to wounds bypassing HP entirely.  This set up a sort of gamble in that the character could probably guess which attack his armor could absorb entirely but of course some attacks may be more than meets the eye.  It's risky and I like it, and it's why I've decided to keep it.  The other solution..not so much.

The second proposal was that armor would provide a flat damage reduction for HP, a 1/2/3 spread for the light/med/heavy armor categories.  This eliminated the need for extra rolling and provided a benefit to people wearing heavy armor even if their defenses were extremely poor.  It sounds nice but in actual playtesting it's far from it.  For a player (and DM's armored NPCs) it's one more thing to remember for every time he takes damage.  Mathematically there is a snafu when damage exceeds HP and goes straight to wounds.  As an example if the player is wearing medium armor and has 4 hit points left and the DMs monster deals 7 damage to him there are a few mental gymnastics you need to do before you can resolve this.  First the 7 damage is reduced by 2, down to 5, this 5 is deducted from hit points leaving 1 damage remaining which carries over to wounds.  The wounds then have an armor rating of 2d6 nullifying the damage.  You can see how that can be confusing and the opposite of rapid combat.  You could create rules and caveats that could manuever around this problem but that would make much less elegant and one more aspect of combat the DM keep stored in his working memory.  So out the door it went.

Aside from that the rest of things went fairly smoothly.  The basic premise of the spell/shaping and mana system turned out fine but as for the actual execution it still needs some work and an eye for balancing it out at higher levels.  The importance of speed was not recognized until actual play and it gave me an elegant idea of what bonus to give people that are unarmored (+1 speed).  Stamina was interesting but partially forgettable due to it's overlap with speed and because the player was getting used to other abilities.  Class features and weapon qualities were all distinct and gave each character their own combat flair.  All in all it was a pretty good playtest and I'm psyched for the future.  Now if only editing and publishing tools weren't so irritatingly inefficient.