Return to Civilized Life and Progress Report

The last few months have flown by.  It started with a relocation cross country trip from East to West Coast, catching a flight overseas then eventually making it back to California for additional schooling.  Now that I've just gotten back from a field exercise in the Southern Californian brushland I am ecstatic to once again have running water, three square meals a day and a nice rack to sleep in.  It also means I have more time for my personal life and projects, not to mention a semi-reliable internet connection while I continue my hotel living on temporary duty assignment.

Where I last left off I mentioned I had been working on a book.  Well I have been for quite some time now; this rules system has taken one shape or another for many years now, each new revision building off the last.  I'd say my initial encounter with the Old School Renaissance (OSR), years back is what influenced me the most.  From that day forward my goal was to drop the exceptional mechanical complexity and to keep it sweet and simple, letting the theater of the mind fill in the form work laid by basic but elegant rules.  Don't get me wrong, this still has plenty more fiddly bits than Holmes basic but each mechanic has been hit by Occam's razor on numerous occasions.

Currently, playtesting is focusing on finding glitches in the system and unanswered questions.  For instance, Ranged weapons fire at the start of initiative so a recent question was whether or not thrown weapons or an elemental blast falls under that clause.  We'll experiment a few more times before we come up with a hard answer.  After a few more cycles of this I'll start working out how I will handle open playtesting.  Initial batches of art have been commissioned and procured but I'd like to have a hell of a lot more so we'll see where the budget falls soon enough.

Below you'll find the basic outline of the book, its contents, and an approximate percentage of how complete it is.

R&D Update: Hit Dice and Hit Points Part 3

After we had converted to 3d6 D&D completely I had an idea in my head that I wanted to tinker with.  Using the previous system of rolling Hit Dice at every encounter instead of adding HP together each Hit Die would be recorded separately in your HP.  This means that with your 3 HD as a third level character if you were to roll 3, 5 and 2 you would record 3, 5 and 2 as your HP.  Seem strange or have you already figured it out?  You see by recording them separately when dealing damage you can treat each individual HD as a buffer protecting your life.  This means that if your opponent roll a 4 for damage, you the defender then assign that damage to one of your Hit Dice; should it be lower than that Hit Dice it bounces off ineffectually as you duck out of the way, if instead it is greater then the Hit Die is defeated and removed.  When you run out of Hit Dice you'll land yourself on Death's Doormat shortly.

R&D Update: Hit Dice and Hit Points Part 2

"He who values his life dies a dog's death"

One of the driving reasons behind altering HP is the attitude I often see in players who have achieved a certain level.  Were I to tell them for their heinous crimes that the guard has been dispatched to arrest them the response I would ordinarily get is "So what?"  Rightfully so, a 5th level fighter is rather adept at dispatching some common guards who on all accounts should be no more than 2nd level.  Throwing more guards at him won't exactly solve the problem if his AC is sufficiently good.  I'm a big proponent against level inflation so I have zero desire to start ratcheting up the levels of guardsman.  While I'm not a big fan of the Eberron setting I did highly appreciate the idea that the only high level characters left, besides a few monarchs were the PC's.  With no one else around it falls on the PC's the shake up the kingdom, dispatch some monsters and save the world.  For that reason I cannot in good conscious merely amp up the level of the town guard to be on par with the PC, it would be unfair to the heroic genre and the goals of fantasy gaming.  Incendiary opinions aside rather than hand-wave it away by saying the guards superior numbers take this vagrant down I would like for there to options in the mechanics to accomplish this.  Either by combat tactics (flanking/surrounded) or a change in the foundation of Hit Points.  Why not both?

R&D Update: Elementalism

Well things have finally settled down to manageable near-crazy levels so I should be able to keep a regular posting schedule.  Plus this weeks upcoming dog sitting will keep me chained to the keyboard.  With that said I can't help but notice it's already October 21st.  My original plan was to have a prototype rule set ready by the end of October.  Of course this isn't the first time I've made such claims but I'm feeling pretty fruitful and since I have a major life/career change on the horizon I'd like to at least publish before I'm potentially overseas for a few years.  So, two weeks left; I could strip a lot and put out something bare bones and serviceable; but like a typical engineer I'd rather just let this one run over budget and sink more time into it.  More time, of course means more playtesting.  Speaking of which:

This playtest gave me a chance to try out two competing resolution system for Channeling the Elements and Unleashing their Fury.  This scenario and it's repetitions took a party of three geomancers, Terra the Teraformer, Frosty the Snowmage and Dr. Witcher M.D.

R&D Update

Dev Diary:
Got plenty of playtesting done today.  Got a lot of experience working with Surprise Rounds, Flat-footed and Flanking and plenty of me forgetting attack bonuses for different weapons, a rather essential change from the last revision.  Fixed plenty of little nuances in game language that otherwise I would not have predicted without running head first into them during playtesting.  The biggest triumph has been a recent overhaul of the weapon type system which is speeding up combat and removing a few hard to remember effects which, while realistic, impeded the flow of play.  I'm satisfied with their more streamlined counterparts although more tweaking may be necessary.

I'm sincerely glad I've taken the modular approach and many layers of complexity can be removed without harm.  Running a few NPC's in addition to the hordes of enemies the player's face is a daunting challenge.  I get the impression that if you have only character to worry about the amount of depth is not overwhelming but we'll see with further play testing.  At the moment the game is very robust before taking on Class features or any sort of character customization.  It's shaping up to be something greater than I imagined.

Still further refinement and pruning is necessary, back to the old grindstone.

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.

A Trio of Vancian Inspired Spells

As promised from yesterday here is a trio of spells I've made that try to emulate Vance's style as best I can.  From my notes and yesterday's painfully long post I determined that this mean spells named after famous magicians, spells with weird effects, spell names using archaic or underutilized words in a language, and spell names that give a good idea towards what the spell does although ambiguity is a plus.

These three will be lesser spells, as I wrote yesterday Vance made a distinction between Lesser and Formidable spells for his Wizards.  I thought it would be a keen idea to allow Lesser spells to occupy all the whimsical fancies of a precocious magic-user whereas formidable spells are reserved for the terrifying tales of stalwart sorcerers.  As you'll see from this post and others, Lesser spells are either too specific to be useful in many occasions or provide a much needed fix but only under certain circumstances.  This time I'll be posting three lesser spells with a fair degree of usability named after famous magicians.  Next time I'll be posting three lesser spells that are entirely situational and likely whimsical. 

Liam's Soporific Problem Solver

 The roguish Liam had a bad habit of putting his foot in his mouth and this spell was born out of his consistent social and often criminal debacles.  The enchantment puts the mortal into a momentary state of fugue, their memories of immediate events are hazy and dream-like giving the caster a second chance.
The mortal is not actually rendered asleep and the longer the caster or another creature stays near the bewitched mortal the faster their recovery, so in a botched bit of thievery it is best to exit the scene immediately and hope your dozing friend cannot put together the pieces of your last encounter. 

Egon's Disastrous Enervation. 

Many believe this spell was closer to a curse than traditional arcana, nevertheless it was a well used tool in Egon's Arsenal.  Egon always had a talent for exploiting the strengths of his aggressors and this spell is no different.  It saps their vim, vigor and vitality when they need it the most.
Many a tale are told when Egon cast this hex upon the giant with boulder above his head ready to crush the spindly wizard, or the time he revealed the dreaded black knight's identity when she could no longer bear the burden of her armor.

Miere's Assuaging Effulgence

A simple cantrip from one o the first magicians, although many will say she did naught but dabble.  This spell grants a soothing glow when those around are most anxious.  A fail-safe for when sudden winds blow out your torch or when the sun fearing beasts of the Wyld are upon your trail.
In recent years many an unscrupulous Wizard have adapted what was once a pristine spell into a trifling set of mood lighting.  The old farmer's adage still holds true today, never leave your daughter round any that don a robe and wizard hat.

A special thank you to Chris Pound for his automated Dying Earth Spell Generator and Max of Malevolent & Benign for putting together a wonderful resource for people looking to use archaic verbose terminology in their quest for spell creation.

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:

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.

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.

Cast off thine tactical grids and embrace the mind's eye!

Going off of Jeff Rient's recent ditchin' the minis post I've been inspired to post an excerpt regarding my own revelations on dumping minis and moving back to narrational movement.  I originally planned on including this in a DM'ing section but I've since decided to adapt it for the combat section so that both players and DMs are on the same page.

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"When I originally started writing these abilities many of them had features or effects involving squares and tactical movement. At the time my players and I had gotten used to and started to expect tactical grid based combat. However, I rather enjoyed hexes for their ability to ignore silly diagonal rules and because I had a few lying around so the name was changed to spaces.

Later on when the OSR kicked in to full swing I decided to pick up a copy of Labyrinth Lord. Suddenly I could remember with full clarity the kind of fun, quick and dirty combats we had when I was younger where all you had to do was relay to the DM where you wanted to go and what you wanted to do and he would  update his mental map and verbally describe the places and positions or he would quickly scribble up something on a sheet of paper (usually graph paper). I loved it and realized how much I missed it. So I went through the classes and the abilities with a fine tooth comb and edited them to remove all the nitty gritty elements of tactical map-based movement.

In it's place grew up nebulous effects like causing opponents to flee, knockback with the actual direction being entirely up to the DM and the characters attributes.  Then I took it a step further and decided that spaces could be a pretty useful, if not nebulous, tool for a DM. You see player character still have a speed, this is represented in spaces which if you desire to use a square/hex map works perfectly well. If like me you'd like to switch back to almost entirely narrational movement a space on the field of combat is whatever you decide it to be.

To some DMs, a space is any increment that places the fencing hero and villain no more than three spaces away from a precarious ledge. To others, it's an increment that causes a melee heavy party to come under projectile fire for a few rounds while they evaluate their lack of ranged weapons (or a big shield!)  To that end a space is entirely contextual, in a bar brawl moving through a throng of people is quite difficult and a space may be something as small as half-a-foot.  It may be even less if you're crawling through a dungeon scaled down for wererats. While a cavalier jousting will have much larger spaces, typically equal to the stride of a charging mount.

In this way you can simulate terrain and other conditions (moving through a crowd) to slow down characters that would otherwise be represented by some rigid static penalty meticulously laid out in some table in the combat section that you can never seem to find. The table will of course have many obvious situations but you may disagree on the severity of the penalty and there will of course be examples that are missing so you'll have to approximate them on your own anyways. In any event with these parting words let me leave you one important guideline.

"Always be consistent"

Your spaces should  be longer for clear outdoor movement than it is for moving through thick foliage, moss covered caverns, and worn down bridges overlooking choppy waves pounding the cliff-side revealing
jagged rocks with every retreating wave.  If you created an ad-hoc penalty for pushing through a crowd, remember it the next time it happens or write it down.  Consistency is the key to keep verisimilitude while a reliance on abstraction can quickly kill it.

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.

Zombie Run

Feeling some fatigue after finishing up a story arc in a giant fighting robot game I'm running I proposed something different for us to play.  A basic Zombie survival game I had cooked up in a moment of inspiration some weeks past.  Lacking imagination at 2 in the morning the game started off in the house we were playing 2 days after the zombie outbreak.  The players grabbed what supplies they could and bolted once zombies started crawling into the garage.  They escaped into the next house where two of the players spent a few moments bickering over whether or not to use the measly ammo they had while the third survivor walked up and started braining zombies whose faces were planted firmly in yesterdays mashed potatoes.

Unfortunately one of them got a lucky shot in and bit the offending survivor killing him.  At which point the remaining two players opened fire and fled into the garage finding the newly rolled character ineffectually huffing carbon monoxide in his still running car.  They slapped him to his senses and sped off into the night.  First stopping by a nearby gas station to siphon gas and then down the road to find shelter in the motel with the least amount of shambling walkers.  They ascended the stairs and wiped out any zeds on the top floor and summarily passed out ending the session.

The system itself is pretty basic. If you've played Shadowrun then this should certainly feel familiar.  It's designed for character creation to take about 5 minutes since the life of a survivor is generally a short one.  The nature of setting allows players to drop in and out almost at will since there's always a zombie somewhere just ready to eat your character or a dark hallway for your panicking character to flee down presumably dieing off camera. When a new player enters the game it shouldn't be too hard to incorporate finding a survivor.  When in doubt use a hero closet!

Without further adieu here is the basic bare bones system we played with.

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Zombie Run

Dice: d6's. 
A roll of 5 or 6 is considered a success.  A roll of 6 allows you to keep the success and reroll the die to try and gain another.  If you roll more 1's than successes the result is considered a critical failure where the GM cooks up something terrible to happen either immediately or in the near future.

When the player proposes an action the Game Master (GM) calls for the player to roll their die pool equal to the sum of a  relevant attribute and skill as determined by the GM.  Some are fairly obvious, Physique modifies Fighting and Coordination modifies Shooting.  At other times the attribute used depends on the situation.  As an example driving down the freeway the GM may initially call for Awareness + Driving to see the runaway car veering towards them to allow them to safely get out of the way.  Failing that the GM may then call for a Reaction + Driving to swerve out of the way before being hit.  If that check fails as well then the GM may then ask for Coordination + Driving to maintain control of the car as the cars collide.

Attributes
Physique: Represents your physical well being and your ability to dole out punishment in a melee.
Coordination: Represents your hand eye coordination and manual dexterity.  Useful for shooting zeds.
Knowledge: The catch all attribute where one's mental capacities are needed.
Awareness: Useful for finding hidden stashes of canned goods and noticing the dead shambling towards you.
Reaction: Used for when you need to get out of dodge and determining who goes first in a round.

Skills
Breaking & Entering: Unlocking doors, breaking glass without hurting yourself and knowing where valuables are stored.
Driving: Used primarily when the living dead are crawling all over your escaping vehicle.
Fighting:  Covers everything from throwing a punch to swinging a bat to throwing rocks.
Mechanics: Ranges from repairing mechanical objects to jury rigging vehicles and assembling effective barricades.
Medicine: Ranges from first aid to field surgery; digging out lead from less than friendly survivors.
Science: If what you're proposing involves volatile chemicals, trajectories or electrified golf clubs this is the skill you're looking for.
Scrounging: Finding hidden caches of ammunition and canned goods.  Hopefully a can opener too.
Shooting: Slightly more advanced than a point and click interface.
Sneaking:  Anywhere from moving silently to not drawing attention to yourself.  Invaluable if you're not looking for a fight.
Survival:  Ability to live off the land and find food, water and shelter.

Traits 
Panic
Panic is added to a d6 you roll the first time your character encounters a zombie in a scene.  A roll of 1 or lower indicates you stand frozen with fear.  A roll of 2-4 indicates you flee in any direction that doesn't visibly have zombies.  A roll of 5-6 lets you stand your ground.  A roll greater than 6 lets you rally your comrades letting anyone that would normally flee stand their ground as well.  You can rally a number of comrades equal to your roll minus 6.  Anyone frozen or fleeing gets to roll panic again at the start of their turn to see if matters change.  This trait ranges from -5 to 5 and starts at 0.
Luck
Luck is added to the players to the 2d6 the player rolls to determine starting equipment.  Additonally:
Positive luck gives a survivor points they can spend each scene that can either counts all 5's as 6's for one roll or have fortune smile on them letting the keys to the car be in the sun visor or finding a resting place with a backup generator.
Negative luck gives the GM points they can spend each scene that allows them to force the survivor to reroll all dice greater than 1 or to have something in the scenery fail nearby the survivor such as a catwalk collapsing, a car refusing to start or a gun jamming.
This trait ranges from -5 to 5 and starts at 0.

Character Creation
Any starting character begins with 25 points. 
Attributes start at rank 1 and cost 3 points to increase in rank.
Skills start at 0 and cost 1 point to increase in rank.
The max rank for either an attribute or skill is 5.
At character creation both abilities and skills are capped at 3.  Choose one attribute to have a max rank of 5 and  two skills to have a max rank of 4.

Trait's start at zero and can be improved to a maximum of five at a one to one ratio.  Alternatively, you can assign negative values to these traits to gain bonus points at a one to one ratio.
A character can withstand a number of wounds equal to 10 plus their Physique before being incapacitated.

Starting Equipment Table
Roll 2d6 and add your Luck Trait.  Don't add your Luck if you are rerolling (Result 13+).  Consult the following list to see what you got! 
X<2 = A thermos filled with salt water
2 = Can of beans
3 = More Canned Goods
4 = Soap Bars
5 = Cowboy Hat - +1 Bad Assery
6 = Cool Shirt -  Rating: Awesome
7 = Crossbow, two bolts
8 = Double Barrel Shotgun, but only one shell!
9 = Hunting Rifle, comes with a scope but sadly no ammo
10 = Sweet Ride (Just above E)
11 = Horde of batteries, gasoline or ammo: roll a d6 for each type (AA, 9V/Bullets, Shells)/ # of gallons
12 = Utility Belt complete with Bat-Anti-Shark Spray
13 = Roll Twice: Choose one.
14 = Roll Thrice: Choose one.
15 = Roll Twice: Take both
16 = Roll Thrice: Take two.
17 = Roll Thrice: Take all three.

Combat  
Mowing down Zombies:
Since zombies don't dodge all that matters is whether or not the survivor can hit. Physique + Fighting is used for melee weapons, Coordination + Shooting is used for ranged weapons, Coordination + Fighting is used for thrown weapons and in the event the players secure a machine gun turret or rocket launcher Physique + Shooting is the die pool they use.

There's only one way to kill a zombie: destroy the brain.  A roll of 6 on a weapon's damage roll is counted as a head shot killing the zombie instantly.  If no 6's are rolled then the number of successes are counted and added to the zombies wounds.  The number of wounds a zombie can have depends on the condition they are in but an average walker has 7 wounds, a more decrepit zombie has a d6 of wounds.  Once a zombie sustains too many wounds it falls feebly to the ground where it will continue to crawl towards a survivor and bite their ankles.  Some zombies may fall over instantly the moment they take a wound and will stand up the next round.  If the GM is feeling devious they can spends a player's negative luck point and the zombie(s) will get back up whenever the survivor's have forgotten about them.

Melee weapon's do not have damage pools, instead any 6 rolled on the attack roll is considered a blow to the head killing the zombie instantly.  If no 6's are rolled the zombie is instead pushed down for the round.

On your turn you may elect to split up your die pool allocating a set amount of dice for each attack made.  You cannot have more sub die pools than your relevant attribute score.  For example a character with coordination of 2  and shooting 3 could only take 2 shots.  Multiple attacks with a projectile weapon will use up that much ammo accordingly.

Survivors have a speed of 5 plus their physique which lets them move that many feet each round.  A wounded survivor has their movement reduce by 1 for each wound they have, although their minimum speed is 1.
When not in danger survivors can use either Knowledge + Medicine (what to use to treat a wound) or Coordination + Medicine (wrapping bandages and stitching up wounds) to heal any wounds they have received at a 1:1 ratio for successes to wounds.  Pain killers can be used to temporarily ignore wounds.

Weapons
 Each weapon has a damage pool which is used if the survivor manages to hit and a clip size indicating how many attacks the weapon can make before needing to reload.  Lastly each weapon indicates what ranges they function at.  In case you're wondering close means the zombie is primed and ready to eat your face.  All other ranges are determined by hand waving.

Ammo type: Bullets.  Count 5's as 6's for head shotting purposes up to short range.
Pistol - d6 ; Clip 10 + d6. Up to Long
Magnum - 2d6 ; Clip 6. Close, Short, Medium

Ammo type: Arrows/bolts.
Crossbow - 2d6 ; Clip 1. Up to Medium. No noise, reusable ammo.
Compound Bow - 3d6 ; Clip 1. Up to Medium. No noise, reusable ammo.

Ammo type: Magazine.  Cannot headshot when splitting die pools.  Bonus d6 when firing at close range.
Submachine Gun - 2d6 ; Clip 10. Close, Short, Medium.  Can split your die pool an additional time.
Machine Gun - 4d6 ; Clip 5. Close, Short, Medium. Can split your die pool two additional times.

 Ammo type: Cartridge/Shell.  Count 5s as 6s for the purpose of headshots in close range.
Carbine - 3d6, Clip 6. Close. One hand, Shotgun.
Pump action Shotgun - 4d6, Clip 8. Close, Sohrt. Halve your coordination when using multiple die pools
Double Barrel Shotgun - 4d6, Close, One barrel for Short, another for Medium Range.  Clip 2
Sawed off Shotgun - 6d6, Clip 2 Close.
Automatic Shotgun - 4d6, Clip 10. Close, Short

Ammo type: High caliber bullet.  Count 4's as successes to hit when not in immediate and impending danger.
Rifle - 3d6 ; Clip 1. Medium, Long
Sniper Rifle - 5d6 ; Clip 1. Medium, Long, Far.
Assault Rifle - Burst 3d6 ; Clip 8. Up to Long.
Spray 4d6 ; Uses 3 shots. Up to Medium. Can split your die pool an additional time.

Eating Survivors:
Survivors are slow, tired and most importantly frightened. Eating them isn't the problem, getting to them is. On their turn zombies either shamble 3 feet towards the living and/or loud noises or take a bite out of a nearby survivor. Simply being within biting range of a survivor is enough to deal one wound to that survivor at the start of a zombies turn.

Biting survivors is somewhat more difficult since the player gets to roll Reaction to see if they get out of the way of the Z's gnashing teeth.  Zombies attack as a ground and the GM has an attack die pool equal to the number of zombies clustered around the survivor.  If he has more successes than the players reaction successes then the survivor is bitten and takes a d6 of wounds.

Depending on the game the survivor is either immediately infected and will soon turn into another of the living dead.  Otherwise the survivor has a 50% chance of survival and the GM rolls a d6 in secret.  An even roll indicates that the virus did not take hold and a roll of 6 indicates immunity.  An odd roll indicates the virus has taken hold and in a number of hours the transformation will be complete.  A roll of 1 indicates system shock and the survivor falls limply to the ground, another meal in the zombie apocalypse.

GM Tips:  Close quarters is your friend, zombie's are swiss cheese out in the open.  Hordes of zombies are a good way to lower the survivor's ammo supplies.  When in doubt throw more zombies at them, roll a d6 each turn they make loud noises or otherwise attract attention.  That number is how many zombies have shambled into view.

Experience
Living survivors at the end of an episode gain a d6 of experience points per scene to improve their skills.  Learning a new skill costs 5 experience and improving a skill costs experience equal to it's current rank.
Raising an attribute costs experience equal to three times it's current rank.

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Thoughts, ideas, and criticisms are welcome!

Hit Dice & Hit Points

In my previous post I talked about redefining the nature of hit points arriving at a concise definition that hit points represent your ability to avoid a hit.  Any attack making it past your defenses would be considered life threatening unless you have hit points remaining to neutralize the hit.  Defining hit points got me thinking about how each class defines their hit points, the hit die (HD).  For those unfamiliar a HD is the type of die you roll to determine how many hit points you gain at each level ranging from the curious d4 pyramid to the mighty and oft neglected d12.

Looking at the way HD are assigned the smallest HD goes to the character least likely to be squaring off in melee, the magic-user, while the largest HD goes to the character you only expect to see in the melee going on and on about the lamentations of women, the barbarian.  A casual observation would seem to indicate that the ones doing the most fighting should have the highest hit dice while the classes that have a wider selection in solving problems have smaller HD.  Well alright, that makes sense to a degree but think about this.  If hit points represent your ability to not be hit, shouldn't the people who want above all to not be hit have the highest hit points.  Meaning that the wizard in his silk pajamas will be doing his best to keep out of the way of stray arrows while the berserker could care less how often he is hit.  Did I just blow your mind?  It's ok, take a moment to collect yourself before we ride this rollercoaster of insanity to the finish.

Wizards with larger hit dice than fighting mans, you can't be serious?!  Oh, but I am.  You see the Wizard isn't going to sit around while bjork the orc swings his radical axe.  He's going to grab his silly hat and hightail it before that axe has a chance to split him in twain.  Frank the tank isn't too worried about this bobbing and weaving nonsense, he's got the armor of his ancestors to look out for him while his vorpal blade goes snicker snack.  As we all know wizards don't wear armor, it gets in the way of their pernicious dance moves.  So it stands to reason in this topsy turvy bizarro world that the wizard should have more hit points than the fighting man because the wizard has a glass jaw!


Now you may be stroking your beard safe under the protection of your cthulu proof cap of tin foil (+1) preparing a counter argument.  Something about not being near an orc or in a melee to begin with.  Also, that men of a fighting nature are used to avoiding retirement ruining blows due to their combat focus.  To which I would agree.  So this is what I came up with.  Each class has a different attribute for hit points.


That's right, no longer is constitution (or whatever variant suits your fancy) the end all be all to hit points.  I initially thought of this when I redefined hit points to be only avoiding hits.  In that case your healthiness didn't completely correlate with that definition.  Sure it makes you more resistant to fatigue but it would make a lot more sense if your agility were boosting your values representing dodging thrusts and blocking slashes.  That got me thinking, wouldn't each class have their own method of avoiding death.  A spy would likely use their quick wits and charm to seize an opportunity and get away.  A magic-user would be shaping the winds to impact the arrows trajectory or shifting a puddle to turn the cobble stone slick prompting their attacker to slip and overexert themselves.  A berserker trusts only in his courage and battle rage to pull him through.  To that end I decided that each class should be using a different attribute to calculate their hit points.

Since I like simple solutions here is what I decided on.  You add your classes primary and secondary attribute modifiers to each hit die rolled.  I designed each class to have at least two attributes that really fit the theme of the class.  The skirmisher type relies on their superior agility to get out of the way and their marathon endurance to keep it up for as long as possible. The magic user relies on their ability to shape the elements to influence incoming attacks and their knowledge of the unknown to threaten curses on those that would attack them sometimes staying their hand.  The leader type relies on their brawn to lock swords with their opponents and either their knowledge of tactics or their courage to lead from the front to carry them through.  If you can't envision how certain attributes could be apply to hit points I've prepared a few examples of non-physical stats below that I think will help.


The Fearless Knight: “You see my lady, most knights will look away at the last minute as the lance hits them to protect their eyes. Not this one, he keeps his eyes on the prize the entire time and that is what makes him dangerous.”

The Inquisitrix: “Seeing the muscles in his neck tense up I knew he was about to do something foolish. His right foot swung out well before his fist did but by then I was already well prepared to intercept.”

The Tactician: “With a weapon that large I imagine most are so stunned that they don't have the chance to get out of it's way.  I bet it would do a lot of damage when it finally hits something but a weapon that size has its own disadvantages. For instance you can only reliably swing that either horizontally or vertically meaning that I've got a 50/50 shot of predicting and evading your attack.  Compound that with such a slow windup time and I'm practically untouchable.  Your move champ."

 The Alchemist Firebug: "I'd reconsider that if I were you.  On a day like today with the sun high in the sky on the thirtieth day of this damnable drought I can only imagine how hot it is in that armor of yours.  Now you see I've taken the liberty of super heating the air around me so that if you even think of drawing steel on me you'll be flinching in pain as the metal starts searing into you producing the same sound as bacon hitting a hot pan.  Those of you foolish enough to cut through the pain can look forward to your armor enjoying the same heat treatment and pretty soon you'll be cooking faster than you can tear that armor off.  So go ahead, draw steel on me and let's see how well that ends.


I briefly considered having different attributes apply to defense and reading the above examples you could certainly make a case for it.  However, I think it would be far simpler to keep a simple unified formula for defense as it would make it easy for players to remember and far easier to design monsters along that way.  Since each class already had two attributes recommended to players it didn't take much to have those two attributes apply to their hit points as well.  Fighting types will more than likely retain their larger HD but all in all I'm rather satisfied with this solution.  If you like feel free to use and adapt it for yourself.

Armor & Hit Points

I had been toying with an idea recently about changing the nature of how Armor would work.  I reasoned that having Armor's damage reduction (DR) apply to every attack could slow down the game by adding to the number of rolls on any given turn in combat.  Having magical weapons bypass non-magical armor would ameliorate the problem to a degree while simultaneously making magic items more awesome (something I'd like to do and move away from Christmas Tree effects.)  However, since the PC's are likely the ones to be packing magical heat all this does is eliminate the rolling for enemies who, when aren't humanoid, frequently do not wear armor.

I came up with another idea based on realism which is so often sought after by out of touch GM's and simultaneously reviled by players just looking to have fun.  Well hopefully this idea doesn't fall into that category.  See I considering having armor apply only to when your Wounds take damage.  [Wounds are discussed here]  Since armor exists to protect those valuable squishy organs and wounds are a reflection of how close you are to dying it goes to reason that armor should invariable be protecting your wounds pool.  This is all well and good but it prompted a discussion on the nature of Hit Points.

As I've always described them to my new players; Hit Points represent your ability to avoid being hit as well as your ability to turn any serious hit into a glancing blows.  It was a simple explanation and it worked but I never really questioned it until now.  For the first part of that definition if hit points represent avoiding hits then why should armor apply.  It certainly did in classic D&D when an attack that made it past your armor class (AC) reduced your hit points.  Looking at it from that perspective armor merely served to turn away all inconsequential blows while an attack that would make it past your armor's defenses prompted a reaction out of you.  Putting it into a narrative perspective this is represented by counting on your armor to absorb a blow but occasionally you will see an attack rapidly approaching a vulnerable point and it's up to you to duck under the beheading stroke.  Examining the abstract nature of hit points again it stands to reason that reduction in hit points can be seen as fatigue setting in.  It becomes harder and harder to parry, duck, dodge and weave until eventually the killing blow comes and that last hit point is mercilessly erased from your sheet.

Looking at it that way Armor could certainly be applied to hit points without the need for head scratching and lengthy explanations (except this one of course).  Let's move a step beyond that and redefine hit points a bit.  In the previous example Armor was the first line of defense turning attacks into a harmless clanging of steel on steel while hit points were a secondary defense occurring only when armor would be defeated.  Let's switch things up a bit and reverse their roles.  This time all attacks carry an air of lethality with them transforming hit points into your first line of defense while armor is the last barrier between you and death.

If this sounds familiar it's because I'm circling around an argument I made in my post about Defense regarding lines of defense.  I haven't forgotten about defense and organizing these three into a hierarchy it goes something like this.  At the top we have defense this serves the purpose of telling which attacks are considered a threat and which can be ignored and if you're feeling particularly bold laughed at.  Below that we have hit points which represent your ability to get out of the way of a potentially life threatening attack.  At the bottom we have armor which is there to stave off the attack that finally wears you down or in the worst case scenario the lucky critical that catches you off guard.  Where things get interesting are the interactions between these three.  Wearing heavier armor limits your Dodge defense which in turn means you are more likely to lose hit points and thus your armor will come into play faster and more often and vice versa.  In essence heavy armor justifies it's own existence.  Sounds silly doesn't it?  Well in a game system where heavy and light armors should be viable these trade offs become a necessary evil intent on squashing the foolish dreams of your full plate fighter with an 18 Dex.

I have some more thoughts on redefining hit points, hit dice specifically, but I will save that for a later post.

Wounds

Let's talk Wounds.  My first experience with them was playing in the Star Wars RCR (Revised Corrected Revision or somesuch) where a player character had Vitality Points (Basically hit points that could also be used to power your Force Wizardry) and Wounds which equaled your constitution score.  Wounds represented how much actual damage you could take and not simply avoid.  For those situations where being hit was unavoidable.

This was pretty cool since people get maimed and chopped in half in Star Wars happened all the time.  It did have one tiny problem though.  You see a critical hit meant that you ignored Vitality and did damage straight to wounds.  Well that's not too terrible provided weapons did not do in excess of 10 damage per hit (they did, frequently).  Now your constitution was anywhere between 3 and 18 if you were a real man or  in the 8-18 range if you rely on point buy tomfoolery.  So when that 3d6 blaster pistol deals damage directly to your 3d6 generated constitution, well, things generally didn't end well.  In the first session of our first campaign the resident sniper critically hit Darth Maul and successfully atomized his head.  We decided to stop using wounds after that.

Still that was not the end of wounds.  In my homebrew game I've been fiddling around with ideas that allow people to navigate through the tumultuous tides of hit points to successfully sucker punch someone knocking them out or to allow an assassin to take out unsuspecting victims without relying on percentage based mechanics.  In my game all heroic character have wounds equal to two stats representing health and hardiness (Non-heroics including minions and mook generally have lower stats and no hit points making it likely for even the begging player character to one shot them without relying on 1HP monsters).   In most cases a character's wounds just acted as additional hit points improving survivability of starting characters without relying on the Triple hit dice SAGA uses.  However, wounds have a much more insidious purpose; whenever you critically hit a target on a surprise attack you deal damage directly to wounds. Replicating the mechanic but adding another requirement (surprise attack) changes this from random death blows to planned random death blows.  A small difference but still a difference.

This allows anyone with a great deal of luck to take out even an important or legendary figure.  Since there are a few ways to initiate a surprise attack outside of the surprise round the odds of these wounding attacks can be improved by careful allocation of character resources lending credence to certain archetypes (Assassin, Spy and Scoundrels spring to mind.)  There are also a few other ways to deal damage directly to wounds, poisons, coup-de-grace and mortal wounds (think uber crits) also fit the bill.

Sum it all up and it introduces a healthy dose of lethality to the game.  I hope this rendition addresses the flaws in the previous encountered incarnation but the only way to find out is to test it out on my players.  I'll consider it a success if they grant me the title of killer DM again.

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Here's a quick  house rule for Saga edition players looking to add wounds back into their game and increase the perceived lethality of a lightsaber.

A character's wounds are equal to their constitution plus their heroic character level.
Optional: You can set first level HP to the maximum of a single classes HD.
On a critical hit a lightsaber deals half of its damage to the target's Wounds.
Note: Lightsabers do not benefit from a Strength modifier to damage.
Lightsabers deal maximum damage to targets with 0 Hit Points.
Optional: Mooks (Non-Heroics) do not have Hit Points merely wounds.
This turns the lightsaber into a weapon of awe against minions as it hacks droids in two and takes the arms off of walrus men at cantinas.

Static Defenses

One of the things I was most impressed with in Star Wars Saga Edition, aside from the keep it simple and straightfoward (KISS) design approach, was how they had handled saving throws.  Third edition of the world's most popular roleplaying game condensed the numerous saving throws of editions past into three main categories, Fortitude, Reflex and Will.  SAGA, and later 4E took this a step forward by turning Fort/Ref/Will into static defenses much like armor class.  SAGA actually omitted a defense stat, instead it was absorbed into reflex so that your reflex defense was pinnacle in dodging blaster bolts and lightsabers alike.

I liked the approach, it made saving throws something other than "roll well or suffer some nasty consequence" as well as integrated them further into basic gameplay elements.  Want to wave your hand and mind trick someone?  Beat their will defense.  Want to knock someone over or put them in a headlock?  Beat their Fort defense.  This was a world simpler than the inherent complexity of grappling rules and touch attacks.  Most importantly by featuring them as static defenses it sped up combat by eliminating an entire side of rolling.  This intrigued me the most as my combats were getting slower or more drawn out each session.

I adopted this approach into my game.  It worked quite well, combat went much faster and the players enjoyed how straight forward it was.  However, there was a growing discontent that we had trouble understanding or even explaining.  Turns out it was simple.  We liked rolling saving throws.  We liked the suspense of whether or not the roll would mean life or death (or mind control, don't forget the mind control!)  So saving throws reverted back to the way they were.  In exchange defense was split in two to retain some of the variety of differing defenses.  The two categories of defense are guard (think parrying and blocking with your shield) and dodge or getting out of the way.

Saving throws went through another big change but that's time for a later post.

Defense

Since Armor was no longer providing a deflection bonus so to speak, it came time to replace armor class with a different score, simply named defense.  Defense was dependent on the characters level as well as the relevant attribute (Dex, Agility, Reflexes etc.)  and as such scaled nicely with attack bonuses.  However, playtesting soon showed that the combination of a few abilities could allow Defense to skyrocket making it nearly impossible to hit.  Those lucky monster that could hit then had to punch through the character's damage reducing armor.

This realization led to three things, first when changing major game mechanics many an ability need to be reevaluated.  Secondly, I decided to scrap attack and defense being on two different progressions of BAB and Level respectively.  Both would be dependent on BCB, or Base Combat Bonus which would be a default stat added to any attack, defense, or damage roll.  Lastly, I realized that if the player character were to receive a double dose of protection from attacks, namely defense and armor, then it suggests that neither of these should afford such protection as to invalidate the other.

I decided that since armor was readily available to most character types that it take a priority over defense.  Characters who wanted to prioritize defense would certainly be able to but they would need to invest character resources to do so rather than have it by default.  This was accomplished by setting BCB to increase every other level rather than every level.  By halving level based attack and defense bonuses other bonuses to attack such as from attributes and feat choices would have a more significant impact proportionally.  This led to more attacks landing which see's armor getting more use while simultaneously lessening it's impact since HP was decreasing at a more frequent pace restoring the fear or mortality in my players.

Defense went through another batch of other changes but I'll get to that in a later post.

Armor & Damage Reduction

In my past game I used armor as a form of damage reduction rather than the traditional deflecting of blows Armor Class represents.  I liked it, as did my players did but there's always room for improvement.  Let's start with the basics.

Each armor set provided an armor die that you would roll to determine your damage reduction.  The heavier the armor the greater the die size ranging from the mild mannered d4 representing leather armor to the mighty d12 representing plate mail.  The rest of the armor's statistics were rooted in their 3.x counterparts with armor check penalties, maximum dexterity, spell failure with minor alterations.  My players enjoyed the extra layer of protection to their fragile characters, especially the characters who were restricted to light armor in a game where attacks and armor class did not scale well.  The combination of defense and damage reduction resulted in a few complications but I'll get to that in a later post.

Armor dice provided an elegant solution for damage reducing armor but I wanted a way to further differentiate different armors for a few reasons.  The biggest concern was that most character classes fell into two categories, those that were proficient in light armor and those that were proficient with all types of armor.  This distinction left medium armor ignored mostly as the former could not equip it and the latter would always choose heavy armor due to it's larger die size.  To solve this problem I implemented two modifications.  The first and simplest was that medium armor would give a smaller penalty to speed than heavier armor.  In the world 1 square inch grids and  6 squares of standard miniature movement this meant that heavy armor would reduce your speed by 2 and medium armor would reduce your speed by one.  {Although recently I've been considering losing the speed penalty entirely for medium armor provided you had a hefty physical attribute score.}

The second modification proved to be much grander in scale in attracting the player's hard earned cash.  Flipping through my old arms and equipment guide I remembered how fascinated I was with the different descriptions of armor when I was younger.  I decided that rather than have a simple spectrum where one armor would arguably be the best while the rest were degrees inferior (AC 8 through 2 I'm looking at you,) instead certain armors were be designed, nay optimized for certain types of combat.  Doing cursory research on how different armor sets evolved and were used historically I decided that chain mail would be optimized vs piercing weapons, scale mail would be optimized vs bludgeoning weapons and lastly lamellar (a heavier armor) would be optimized vs slashing weapons (the most common damage type in my games).  This was represented mechanically by the simple rule that the armor die would be maximized versus the type of attack the armor was optimized for.  This simple addition convinced at least one player to purchase a set of chainmail after feeling the sting of a hydra's many fangs.

To wrap things up I decided to drop a number of 3.x paradigms and streamline the armor process slightly.  Spell Failure was dropped entirely, since with only one spell casting class if they want to wear heavier armor and spend the resources to do so then there is no point in further penalizing them.  Armor check was simplified to a standard value per size category. Lastly the maximum bonus one could receive from dexterity (later agility) was 1/2 for medium armor and none for heavy armor.  These rules of thumb made it easier for myself and my players to remember the drawbacks of armor without upsetting the relative balance of the system.

Up Next:  Defense, Wounds and Hit Points