#tenleagues musings

[tenleaguesbeneath]

Random thoughts toward a D&D-alike attribute generation system:

Things I like from 3d6-in-order:

You don’t meet your character until you generate them. Rather than coming up with a character concept and fitting it into the rules (or bringing in a preexisting character and importing them), you learn about your character through the process of generating them.

Characters have unexpected strengths; a character is not entirely predictable from their class.

Things I don’t like:

Tends to generate mediocre and boring characters. Very high odds of getting all/almost all stats in the 9-12 range, which is boring.

Can generate unbalanced parties

Basically everything else

A thing I’m neutral on:

Not knowing your character class until you roll

So!

I’m thinking about something using card draws. You get a certain number of draws, and every draw adds a minor positive feature to your character, or possibly negates a negative one.

I think I’d line the suits up with classes. Going with the classic four, Diamonds-Thieves and Hearts-Clerics are the obvious pairings; the tarot suit equivalents suggest Spades-Fighters (Swords) and Clubs-Mages (Wands). Arguably, the tarot suits could be used all around; coins for thieves and cups for clerics, but that leaves a question of what to do with the major arcana (tbh, probably best left out).

Then each card in each suit needs to be assigned an ability. Probably I would use enough draws in character creation that abilities don’t have to be exactly balanced (it’ll average out over enough draws) but none of them can be too powerful for a first-level character to have.

How many draws? Five is probably too few, thirteen (a full bridge hand) is probably too many.

For abilities, I’m thinking:

Spades:

Always-on bonus to melee damage (replaces the bonus from a high strength score)

Always-on to-hit bonuses

Extra HP (replaces the bonus from a high constitution score)

Better starting equipment (yeah, this one gets obsoleted pretty fast, but it helps you survive long enough to obsolete it)

Weapon specialization?

Hearts:

Auspicious divine influence?

AD&D’s only bonus spells were a cleric-only thing for high wisdom. I could see having it give spell slots that, for non-clerics, can only be used for certain spells. especially for healing spells.

I’d put any destiny stuff here, too. If your character is prophesied for something or cursed in some way, that’s a hearts thing.

Really though anything to do with clerics depends pretty deeply on how clerics work and I’m not happy with that.

Diamonds:

Stealth bonus (importantly, this applies whether or not you’re a thief)

Bonus vs surprise attacks?

Criminal contacts?

Clubs:

Otherworldly contacts

Chance to understand strange languages

Improved chances to identify magic/if you’re using classic-style chance to learn spell rolls, improved chances there (D&D3 equivalent would be a spellcraft skill bonus)

If I’m doing the AD&D2 thing where specialist wizards are rare, some might be empty prerequisites (drawing the 4 of clubs during character creation means you can specialize in evocation but if you don’t play a wizard it doesn’t do anything else)

I might also consider penalties (analogous to low-stat penalties) for short suits. If you have no clubs in your chargen hand, you’re illiterate, for instance, With a lot of draws, I might include penalties for singletons as well, not just voids.

I might also consider some chance for bonuses for pairs, threes, and four of a kinds, but probably only for face cards. Any bonuses that exist for those are things that only some characters are getting without other characters getting an equivalent, with the only “cost” being that you have to be spread a little thin to have them (not counting the luck needed to draw them)

If I go the tarot route, I’d have major arcana add significant benefits, but at a tradeoff. Some of them might just straight-up have “get this, lose this,” while others would have something like “pick another card you’ve drawn from this character to lose and get this, or lose this card,” but what they offer I’d make pretty wild.

#tenleagues musings

[tenleaguesbeneath]

some musings toward hacking together a system to run my home games

combat engine wise, I'm drawn to either one-roll (well, maybe more like one+each rolls, where you roll once to determine the outcome of the whole combat and then each player rolls to determine personal consequences) or a puzzle combat system where rather than the enemy's defenses adding up to give it an armor class that you roll against, each one is a real thing.

Like, for instance, a knight in articulated plate with a zweihander would have a reach advantage (explicitly: you can't get close enough to use your weapons against him because he'll cut you up and push you back) and the armor protects all areas except for gaps too small to be practical to hit while he's up and moving, especially at range, and those are real in the game system. Rather than AC just he no-sells your attacks until you figure out a way to negate those advantages.

At the same time I want something more concrete and real than PbtA stuff does. I like the illusion that the narrative isn't just the GM and players saying stuff, that there's something concrete under it that the rules govern, that successes and failures are the result of interactions with the world and the mechanics rather than something the GM hands out. I like strings though, strings are good. I'm particularly thinking about thydungeonguy's recent posts about systems where the different parts (social interaction and combat) all play in to each other, with a shared metacurrency between combat and non-combat encounters.

I've had a little experience with Torchbearer and there's a lot I'd borrow from it and a lot I wouldn't. I like the grind. Honestly I'd want to take some of the emphasis away from the Conflict engine it has (in particular how you can basically never get enough Checks to rest properly without conflicts); just making plain dungeon crawling arduous is good. But I think I'd still want an OSR-style turn system over Torchbearer's.

Explicitly tracking characters' emotional states (like Torchbearer does, with Angry and Afraid as status conditions) is good.

I'm especially thinking of this in conjunction with psionics, and in particular this twitter thread about psionic archetypes and how D&D gets them wrong. Since I'm lately playing sci-fi psionic stuff that's on my mind.

I want some degree of random character generation, though stars without number's thing of making that optional but then giving an expectation value somewhat higher than opting out (three rolls vs two picks for background skills, or the raise option if you roll stats 3d6 in order). Not sure how much compatibility with D&D I want; that'd be a nice-to-have though. Honestly, what I like from random character generation is having a process to go through to meet your character, rather than just creating someone tailor-made, and don't like characters who are entirely optimized around doing one thing well. The random boons after you pick your class in On A Red World Alone are good, although I like the option for a random class which that system doesn't have.

Likewise, I want progression to be a mix of organic and player-guided. I don't want you to plot out a build from first to max level and have all that set in stone before play begins. At the same time there is something appealing about being able to quickly generate NPCs with just class and level. Tough needle to thread. I'm not sure I even like classes for anything else. but also adventuring gets you seriously injured and you may have to retire due to that.

I also don't want high-level characters to be godlike and I don't even necessarily want them to be rich. Being the best there is at what you do but having whatever wealth you gain go as quickly as you get it is a staple story.

#tenleagues musings

[tenleaguesbeneath]

On the one hand, I love random stat generation, especially for games where survival is not assured, but also, like, I like meeting my character for the first time when I roll for them.

on the other, 3d6 in order is a weird ritual that you do at the beginning of the game, before new players have any context for what that means.

I like the level 0 funnel I’m running. One thing that I’d change about it though is that it starts the PCs with major penalties to all stats b/c of severe dehydration; I’d change that to a straight reduction to minimum functional for all of them, and delay attribute rolling until they can drink.

Maybe even then. Maybe you get, like, roll 1d6 and 1d5 for one strength and one weakness (or a d30 table), then 3d6 twice. then you have a few choices:

- Put the better roll in the thing you’re better at and the worse in the thing you’re bad at

- Put the “reverse” of the worse roll (21 minus the roll) in the better attribute, and either the better roll or its reverse (whichever is lower) in the worse attribute.

There’s still a (not insignificant) risk that both will be about average; since results in the 9-12 range show up about half the time on 3d6, if we want to avoid this we can add another special rule, perhaps changing 3s to 2s and 4s to 5s (or even 1s and 6s) on die results that are in the 9-12 range (removing them entirely, going to a d4 marked 1,2,5,6, only reduces the odds of an average result to 3 times in 8).

Or just reroll if that happens, I guess. Since this system something changes every even number going up/odd going down, we’re only concerned with things piling into the 10-11 range. That only happens about a quarter of the time, so 1/16 on both results. which is rare enough to justify rerolling.

Then roll everything else when it comes up. If someone asks “who’s the strongest in the group” you can invite everyone who hasn’t rolled it yet to roll for strength. If people are looking for someone to try to translate an inscription, the same for intelligence.

#tenleagues musings

[tenleaguesbeneath]

combat-heavy games really play differently without morale checks. I think Wizards D&D’s experiment in replacing them with just telling the DM to acknowledge that monsters have a sense of self-preservation in their decision-making was a bad one. an easy mechanic for “under these circumstances, remember that NPCs might flee the scene”, and for determining whether “might” resolves into “will” when the DM is unsure, makes the game better

it might also reduce the murderous tourist aspect of it, if NPCs running away or surrendering is a normal thing (also if combats aren’t balanced to be easy for the PCs)

#tenleagues musings

[tenleaguesbeneath]

There are, somewhat, two genres of RPGs. There’s one that’s focused on telling stories, where the overall outcome of the situation is too important a decision to leave to the mechanics. You use narrative methods for that.

In the other, you’re facing challenges alongside your character. The outcome of the situation is determined by how well you resolve that challenge.

D&D tries to split the difference. It started as a game of the latter form, and mutated into a game of the former over time. It’s full of relics of the latter form (character death mechanics that can be triggered by a series of bad die rolls, for instance), but the detailed character building rules allow for the former (one example, as player, you own your character and what you say goes wrt their development arc, and also, within mechanical limitations, their abilities)

Part of it is that the former allows for a wider variety of playstyles. A character in the latter situation must have a degree of competence and professionalism, or their failures force other people to lose at things they were struggling to win. In the former, you can have a character who creates problems (through incompetence or on purpose), or works at cross-purposes to another PC, but doing that doesn’t snatch a hard-earned win out of their hands, so it’s less antagonistic. You can do drama like that knowing that the most severe consequences of it will be subject to at least one person’s decision (in better games, a group decision) of what consequences will be appropriate.

Inviting people to play chaotic troublemaker characters meant DMs tried to support that choice by adding the kinds of safety bumpers to their games that make a chaotic troublemaker a viable member of the group, which led to designers writing those common house-rules into the official rules, which in turn reinforced the idea that the overall outcome of the situation shouldn’t be at stake over mere mechanical die rolls.

I think leaning hard into one or the other (either the game is about facing challenges alongside your character, and sharing in their victories or defeats, or it’s about telling a story, where their victories and defeats are a gift from you) works better than splitting the difference. I tend to run games that lean more on challenge than on narrative, personally

#tenleagues musings

[tenleaguesbeneath]

I’m still letting that idea to let people create any character they want and play that, but have to meet standard table constraints and not have EXP turn over in my head

One idea I’m having is mixing characters created that way with characters created conventionally. Characters created that way don’t gain EXP, though.

I’m also thinking that flattening spell levels out might be a good idea for my classless system, both because of that and just, like, in general. Or, specifically, flattening out spell slots. I might keep the six-level classification for spells, but divide out spell slots into maybe only 3 levels, in part because I want unlocking a higher-level spell slot to be an earned moment in-game, and six levels is a bit much for that.

This also means that 2nd-level spells can be, like, given out to characters who aren’t dedicated mages, and are easier for a mage to carry as staple spells. Spells at higher levels being more and more difficult to bring to bear can still be a thing though

Circling back, it means that a custom-made character doesn’t have to have a customized list of spell slots of six levels, but rather just gets three categories, which is easier to customize things into. Lesser/Medium/Greater or Least/Lesser/Greater or Novice/Initiate/Master.

I like the idea of standardizing the number of hit dice you get as well. The game has something of a sweet spot in terms of hit dice, and a fully-customized character might do best to just hit that.

Unrelatedly, I might want to rework strength. I haven’t gotten enough games off the ground testing this strength system to tell.

First, the independence of STR and CON means that we’re getting a bunch of fighters who can’t stand in the front line. There should be something that can go into the game to correct that, and give high strength characters the ability to get better hit dice.

Second, I might want to make things more simply based on level. Your class, in all cases, is basically “Human Adventurer”, and I might want the attack progression to be more uniform (maybe with more early differentiation for strength, but then, OD&D didn’t do that and it worked fine). Maybe, similar to what I’ve done with making spell slots into unlocks, give a medium progression to more or less everyone and include unlocks in the GM rules to be handed out appropriately to raise it to a high progression.

#tenleagues musings #tenleagues classless system

[tenleaguesbeneath]

I don’t really like the design of the Mimic as a monster.

I can see why it got that way. It was designed to function against groups from levels 3-9-ish, and a single Mimic has to be able to mess you up in an ambush regardless of where you are in that range; like it has to be something you want to fight at an advantage regardless of what level you are. So of course it has 7 hit dice.

That’s kinda more powerful than I’d like, though. I’m thinking instead there should be some way in which it wears you down other than hit points, some other factor which it attacks, but it has fewer hit dice. Do that, and until people stack magic armor bonuses high enough that it can’t hit them, they’ll be worried about it.

Now I just need to figure out what mimic venom or whatever needs to do...

#tenleagues musings #dungeons and dragons #mimics

[tenleaguesbeneath]

Low-level Dungeons, High-level Wilderness

It seems backwards to me that the starting group should be unable to safely go out into the wilderness but can profitably raid dungeons, provided they stay in the specially marked easy zones of the dungeon.

At the same time, it is reasonable that wildernesses would be an anything-goes zone where stuff across the entire power curve is all right next to eachother. A dragon is as likely to be in the wilderness as anything else is.

What sits wrong with me, then, is the idea that if you go into the dungeon, the marked-off underworld place of danger and doom, you’re actually in less danger than you were outside it, since outside you could be attacked by wyverns and gray renders, but neither of those show up on the random encounter table for dungeon level 1.

Then, also, going out into the wilds to poach deer or firewood should be a part of normal peasant activities (to say nothing of, like, visiting a pasture for the first time in a season). Plus, a ranger needs to be able to be a ranger from level 1, if your game has rangers.

The West Marches solution of having different wilderness zones with different difficulties, akin to dungeon levels, is maybe viable, with various areas being under the control of different monster groups and therefore showing different amounts of danger. I’m wondering if other solutions exist. It is, perhaps, the most real; the single-generic-wilderness-table might be better used to generate new regions (i.e. “this region has in it *rolls* a goblin lair, a terrain-appropriate chromatic dragon, and a giant anthill. Okay, time to build a regional encounter table from that); you’re unlikely to simply stumble across a random settlement of 300 orcs unless you’re far from any place you have any knowledge of.

Another possibility would be to raise dungeon difficulty and have people start above 1st level. One idea I’m toying with is giving players the option of starting at 1st level or at a higher level (maybe 2d4 or 1d6+1) for their first characters of a campaign only, but higher level characters take a permanent EXP penalty: all incoming EXP is divided by your starting level. The idea would be you start with a mix of mid-level veterans and low-level recruits, then retire the veterans and replace them with new recruits when the recruits are levelled enough to take their places. This means that every player, at some point in the campaign, is going to be overshadowed, though.

#tenleagues musings

[tenleaguesbeneath]

I’m feeling more and more that my ideal D&D would be something where all important chunks of information fit on index cards.

Your basic character sheet fits on an index card. Your significant items fit on an index card each; your backpack and the rest of its contents fit on an index card. Your spells each fit on an index card (conveniently, this is also your notation for what you have memorized). Your character sheet is a bunch of index cards rubber banded together.

Any rules too long to fit on an index card get trimmed down. maybe they get an accompanying bit of GM’s guide commentary with some example rulings to get across their intent, but that should be kept to a minimum

#tenleagues musings

[tenleaguesbeneath]

I think most worries about 3d6 in order would vanish if you scaled the numbers one point different, so the 10-11 or 9-12 range was +1 instead of unmodified and the “unmodified” range was 5-8 (BX/Dungeon World/ACKS modifiers) or 8-9 (Wizards D&D).

It’s not even that people want their ability scores to give them bonuses to rolls. It’s loss aversion, it’s that people want to have better-than-even odds that their ability score won’t give them a penalty.

#dungeons and dragons #tenleagues musings

[tenleaguesbeneath]

Reading through this article series on A Wizard’s Kiss: The Prestige Class in Old-School D&D, and What I Talk About when I Talk About Prestige Classes (part 2), and reviewing the post that just popped out of my queue about multiclassing, I think, affirms for me that multiclassing shouldn’t just be a bolt from the blue “I’ve earned enough EXP, I’m multiclass now”. Similar to prestige classes, which reflect something in the world (the author linked says they are “diegetic”, which in movies describes a sound which is made by something in the universe of the movie, as opposed to mood music or narration)

I’m thinking about how I’d apply that in my Swords and Wizardry-based games. With only three or four classes there’s a lot less to invent.

#tenleagues musings

[tenleaguesbeneath]

I’ve seen two encumbrance systems that I really like based on the “you can carry a number of significant items equal to your STR score” principle, which seems sound (an encumbrance system where you can compute what level of load a character is carrying at a glance?).

One, the Goblin Punch system, where a sword, helmet, or whatever counts for a full item, but the “you can carry up to” limit is for unencumbered movement; you can go above your limit if you’re either willing to face encumbrance penalties or wearing a heavy backpack (your options are a backpack for +2 inventory slots or a bandolier to make one more of your inventory slots “fast”).

Two, Delta’s stone encumbrance system, where “light items” count for a third of an item (i.e. things can take non-integer numbers of item slots, unless you triple your number of slots), but the encumbrance value equal to your strength is your maximum load at half movement (your “heavy load” in 3e terms).

I’m not sure which I like better

Arguably, by being stricter about items taking multiple slots and expanding the encumbered and heavily encumbered ranges in the Goblin Punch system, you can make it equivalent to the stone system rather than an abstract thing of its own. I don’t think I’d want to do that, though.

#tenleagues musings

[tenleaguesbeneath]

Random idea:

So, in the modern day, there’s a horse registry where you can look up any horse that has lived in the last, idk how long, by name, and find out its pedigree, who owns it, who has owned it, and so on. It’s done by computers. This is why horse names are so weird; they have to be unique compared to all horses known to the registry.

What if a D&D game had something like that, except in a preliterate society which kept its horse registry in the form of an epic poem? Your horse names, in addition to having to be unique as far back as the epic goes, would then have to fit into the right meter. When a foal is born you would have to find a bard to help you name it (and the bards might have some constraints, perhaps a list of words they must include and another list they can’t include, so that no two bards accidentally name a horse the same thing and force a meeting where you have to change one of the horses’ names)

There’s no reason why you would do this, but this seems like it would lead to gameable hijinks, and that’s what really matters.

#tenleagues musings #this is sort of inspired by a comic i saw but can't find #that was like 'pretend every line of a poem is the name of a horse then every poem becomes a list of horses' #only like in reverse #your list of horses is the most banal epic poem ever composed

[tenleaguesbeneath]

One option that fixes the problem of enclosed dungeons known to be danger areas full of monsters being less dangerous than just wandering around the woods and mountains is, of course, the archetypal rat-catching job, i.e. first-level PCs don’t go into the dungeon proper, but a cellar that maybe connects to it, and fight pests rather than monsters. This is unsatisfactory for a lot of reasons though.

Another option is to have very generous stealth rules and start wilderness encounters at long distance. If, in the wilderness, you are likely to run into big and dangerous enemies but when you do you will have plenty of opportunities to avoid them (sneak past, go around, run away), while in a dungeon you’re in closer confines with fewer options, that might make more sense.

Part of what I’m trying to produce here is the idea that opening up a pasture that hasn’t been used for a season (maybe you brought the cows closer to home for winter, maybe you’re migratory) is not something you’ll need to bring a party of 5th-level adventurers for, even if it’s a mile or three outside the village. A 0-level herdsman can just do it unless there’s a problem, and if there is a problem, they’re still unlikely to be killed, especially before they can make it back to the village to ask for help. For that matter, the herdsman should be able to camp out by the pasture a few leagues out of town

This could be a matter of map scale. The giant wilderness encounter table is a table of what-lairs-in-this-hex at league or two league scale hexes; on a smaller-scale map your random encounters are based on nearby lairs. A clan of migratory herdsmen then would send the expert party out to clear the monsters that lair in or near their summer village, but then once they move in the herdsmen can spread out the herds without needing the adventurers to directly supervise.

Another option is to mess with the non-mechanical difficulty level in the upper dungeon. Maybe the upper dungeon is more merciful not because the things there are weaker than in the middle dungeon but because they are more amenable to negotiation, perhaps, or more restricted in territory. This is a path I’m already looking at for something else. The upper dungeon, then, becomes more like the wilderness that borders it (i.e. full of dangerous things that you can avoid) rather than being glutted with weak monsters.

So that’s four possible resolutions to the problem (rat-catching, stealth, map scaling, and parley), two to change the dungeon, and two of which make 1st-level characters more able to survive the outdoors, plus the possibility of changing the launch conditions for the campaign so “everyone is first level” situations happen less, from the previous post. I like these solutions better though.

#tenleagues musings

[tenleaguesbeneath]

If I were going to fix the Wild Magic sorcerer origin, the big thing I’d get rid of is the need for the DM to pay special attention to it. Every sorcerer spell you cast, roll d% and if you get the spell level or less, it surges. If you’ve used Tides of Chaos, triple your surge chance (and recover it on any surge). As an optional rule, double all surge chances for spells of the highest level you can cast (6 times if you used Tides of Chaos. so the highest surge chance is 54%, if you cast a ninth-level spell while trying to recover Tides of Chaos).

On roll20 I’d even make it “every spell you cast, roll 1d10000-1. On a result where the hundreds place is less than the spell level, use the surge result indicated by the last two digits”, but pen and paper there’s no advantage to rolling 1d10000 vs 2d% consecutively.

#tenleagues musings #D&D5

[tenleaguesbeneath]

While researching to keep my encumbrance rules accurate, I asked the internet, “how many arrows does an archer carry?” I’m not the first to as the internet that question, as this Quora result shows. And there’s an answer for Agincourt: “Arrows were produced in sheaves of 24, and archers carried between 60-75 with them into battle. . . . Each archer carried two sheaves of arrows in his quiver and the rest stuck in his belt for quick and easy access, though he may have stuck them in the ground when he was entrenched in a position (say, Agincourt.)”

Arrows for a Mongol horse bow would be shorter than arrows for an English longbow, and the next answer says the Mongol horse archers carried multiple quivers of 60.

Since I’ve already established that a typical arrow weighs about an ounce (negligible on a stone-weight scale. Like over 200 arrows to the stone), I think that means the correct capacity for a quiver that weighs a third of a stone should be 60 arrows.

I’d still count a quiver as being a full “light item” as long as it’s hanging from your hip, though.

Even at a 10-second round timescale, giving a bow a two shots/round rate of fire (like Gygax does and Delta argues is an error) is apparently justified using the Agincourt statistics, incidentally (two shots per 10-second round works out to exactly 12 shots per minute, typical of a military longbowman). However, in my play experience, I’ve found that giving two bow attacks for every sword attack distorts balance pretty dramatically (bows are literally twice as effective as any comparable weapon). Delta has, of course, analyzed this; his justification for limiting a low-level character to half the historical rate is that he assumes your PC spends more time aiming than a historical massed archer (who only needs to lob an arrow into a formation of men). Gygax’s balance solution was extremely punitive rules for shooting into melee; Delta’s rules are much less punitive (on a roll of 10 or less, you may have to roll a second attack roll against another target with no modifiers except target AC). If someone wanted to use Gygax’s bow ROF, it’d come with Gygax’s shooting into melee rules, for sure.

Another option would be to make a bow attack call for you to check off two arrows, but that’d just be obnoxious.

#tenleagues musings