Monday, August 26, 2019
Tales of Mordhearse on Itch.io
I wrote up a fancy 2 page pdf for the Tales of Mordhearse hyperlite ruleset, slightly altered, and containing an example dungeon. It's hosted on itch.io. The game owes its chassis to Into the Odd and Zelda & is intended to get people playing with little to no experience. All the gaping holes are on purpose--you're supposed to make up the stuff that fills in the blanks.
Sunday, August 18, 2019
Shields & combat hack rules
If
you let your shield get sundered you get hurled 10 feet and land on
your ass, dazed. It doesn't just fall to matchsticks harmlessly at your
feet while you reach for another one. Also in my games stopping combat
to dig around in your backpack leaves you open to free attacks from
everybody within reach, and they get a +2 bonus.
Here's some fun combat houserules for you straight from my hacked OD&D campaign:
- Make unarmored AC 8, so plate+shield is AC15. That'll speed up combat.
- Make all 1-3s different degrees of utter failure and 18-20 degrees of critical success. Very high/low rolls should dramatically affect combat. No whiffs--every combat turn there's some kind of fictional repositioning.
- You can't move & reload a crossbow at the same time, also you lose a turn.
- Getting flanked means -2 AC, and maybe higher damage.
- Use d6 for single-handed weapons, d8 for 2-h. All HD are d6.
- Fighters can chain extra attacks when they land a killing blow. At 4th level fighters can make 2 attacks. At 8th level they can fight two enemies simultaneously (they can't be flanked)
- Flavor your weapons by changing what they do on good hits: Maces shatter armor, crush bone, inflict mangling trauma. Axes can grapple shields and easily sever limbs. Daggers are quick, can be thrown if they're in hand as a free action,and slice arteries. Swords parry and flash quickly and often get extra attacks. Polearms are long, get first strike, and can be swung in a wide arc to hit multiple dudes but leave you wide open.
- Close ranged attacks get a +2 bonus instead of long-distance ranged getting a penalty.
- Double damage for crits and sneak attacks. (Alternative; crits are dCarcosa). Chaining crits or especially risky successes add extra dice.
- All dice explode. All of them.
- Getting exactly 0 HP means you survive but get some kind of horrific trauma.
- Characters with 13+ Dex can dual wield; roll with advantage on attacks or make two attacks at -2.
- Anybody can attempt to cast a spell from a scroll but they have a high risk of botching it which means you get to roll on your most fiendish magical mishap tables.
- If you have never, try using miniatures. It's fun.
Tuesday, August 13, 2019
High Adjudication: Checks Without Difficulty Class
Difficulty class is known to skyrocket once you start trying to classify everything with a set number. As the players get better it becomes necessary to raise the bar to keep them struggling.
Adjudications and rulings not rules means DMs should be comfortable coming up with odds for success on the spot without relying on a set rule.
Personally I don't like having any real rules beyond the very basics, the stuff the players need to know to function, like how classes, advancement, battle, and spells work. This gives me lots of room to try new techniques.
An alternative for stat checks I haven't seen is this: roll a d20, add the stat mod. Loosely adjudicate based on the number rolled.
1 is critical failures. Not only did you fuck up but something really bad happens.
These drop off in severity up to 9. Lead from the fiction and push back either hard or soft, but there's a new barrier.
Natural 10 is the cut off. Below this you failed or things swing against you. At 10 their ability mod might put things one way or another a bit, but it's mostly a stalemate. Either you made little progress or theres some kind of unforseen consequence, a barrier, a cost, something is lost on the way to success. A soft negative move might happen here, the player makes the jump to the ledge, almost slips and falls, and part of the ledge crumbles away making further leaps across more difficult.
12+ is about where success happens. Things are going good, you've managed to do the thing. Usually here I'll give The World a soft neutral move, usually just for flavor or to ramp up tension, but nothing bad happens. You're safe.
17-19 is where great successes start happening, things swing a bit in the player's favor. Not only do they manage to catch the rope as their companion falls, but a sudden burst of strength lets them start hauling them back up quickly.
20 is obviously a critical success. Free moves, bonus attacks, whatever.
The key here is to understand what the player is trying to do and tell them the consequences for failure. Rolling the dice means throwing stuff to chance, so there's no point in having a DC. Shits up in the air. You're literally "rolling the dice" and flying by the seat of your pants. In such a case the swinginess is a boon. Leaving things up to chance is not smart, it's stupid, but sometimes unavoidable. In a way it's a punishment for taking risks.
But big risks come with big rewards. Players are required to figure out what a reasonable risk is before they pull the levers, what they're willing to lose in the way to fame and glory.
The dice is a slot machine. Your PC's ability mods might help push things in your favor, but nothing is ever certain. Careful, clever play and engaging with the fiction is the best way to avoid rolling dice.
Edit: I was wrong when I said I haven't heard of anyone else doing this. This is basically the Dungeon World mechanic!
The difference here is that DW uses 2d6, so you're more likely to get middle results than a wide spread, and ability modifiers affect the roll more with 2d6. In my version the mods might just make the difference in edge cases, which is kind of how I like it.
It's easy to forget that when we're talking about PCs we're talking about capital-A Adventurers. These guys are just a cut above normal folks. They're veteran warriors, mages who can cast AN ACTUAL SPELL, members of a clergical crusading sect, and...well, thieves. They're competent at what they do or they wouldn't be first level.
Should a mage be able to bend iron bars? Should a fighter be able to decipher an ancient manuscript? Should a cleric be able to hide and sneak attack? It depends on the type of game you want to run.
With my system averagely abilitied dudes could do mostly the same things. With free adjudication you can make the dice roll anything that seems reasonable. Maybe a mage's success at bending the bars means he's able to wedge them just enough for him to squeeze through but not the bulky warrior. Maybe having a bonus in an ability means that your successes are that much more successful. Mods as multipliers?
A +3 means unless you roll a 1 the lowest score you can get is 5 (on a natural 2) which is only halfway between a total failure and squeaking by! It also means you hit the success threshold easier.
The thing I like about this is that it allows for partial results and building momentum rather than pass/fail.
Adjudications and rulings not rules means DMs should be comfortable coming up with odds for success on the spot without relying on a set rule.
Personally I don't like having any real rules beyond the very basics, the stuff the players need to know to function, like how classes, advancement, battle, and spells work. This gives me lots of room to try new techniques.
An alternative for stat checks I haven't seen is this: roll a d20, add the stat mod. Loosely adjudicate based on the number rolled.
1 is critical failures. Not only did you fuck up but something really bad happens.
These drop off in severity up to 9. Lead from the fiction and push back either hard or soft, but there's a new barrier.
Natural 10 is the cut off. Below this you failed or things swing against you. At 10 their ability mod might put things one way or another a bit, but it's mostly a stalemate. Either you made little progress or theres some kind of unforseen consequence, a barrier, a cost, something is lost on the way to success. A soft negative move might happen here, the player makes the jump to the ledge, almost slips and falls, and part of the ledge crumbles away making further leaps across more difficult.
12+ is about where success happens. Things are going good, you've managed to do the thing. Usually here I'll give The World a soft neutral move, usually just for flavor or to ramp up tension, but nothing bad happens. You're safe.
17-19 is where great successes start happening, things swing a bit in the player's favor. Not only do they manage to catch the rope as their companion falls, but a sudden burst of strength lets them start hauling them back up quickly.
20 is obviously a critical success. Free moves, bonus attacks, whatever.
The key here is to understand what the player is trying to do and tell them the consequences for failure. Rolling the dice means throwing stuff to chance, so there's no point in having a DC. Shits up in the air. You're literally "rolling the dice" and flying by the seat of your pants. In such a case the swinginess is a boon. Leaving things up to chance is not smart, it's stupid, but sometimes unavoidable. In a way it's a punishment for taking risks.
But big risks come with big rewards. Players are required to figure out what a reasonable risk is before they pull the levers, what they're willing to lose in the way to fame and glory.
The dice is a slot machine. Your PC's ability mods might help push things in your favor, but nothing is ever certain. Careful, clever play and engaging with the fiction is the best way to avoid rolling dice.
Edit: I was wrong when I said I haven't heard of anyone else doing this. This is basically the Dungeon World mechanic!
The difference here is that DW uses 2d6, so you're more likely to get middle results than a wide spread, and ability modifiers affect the roll more with 2d6. In my version the mods might just make the difference in edge cases, which is kind of how I like it.
It's easy to forget that when we're talking about PCs we're talking about capital-A Adventurers. These guys are just a cut above normal folks. They're veteran warriors, mages who can cast AN ACTUAL SPELL, members of a clergical crusading sect, and...well, thieves. They're competent at what they do or they wouldn't be first level.
Should a mage be able to bend iron bars? Should a fighter be able to decipher an ancient manuscript? Should a cleric be able to hide and sneak attack? It depends on the type of game you want to run.
With my system averagely abilitied dudes could do mostly the same things. With free adjudication you can make the dice roll anything that seems reasonable. Maybe a mage's success at bending the bars means he's able to wedge them just enough for him to squeeze through but not the bulky warrior. Maybe having a bonus in an ability means that your successes are that much more successful. Mods as multipliers?
A +3 means unless you roll a 1 the lowest score you can get is 5 (on a natural 2) which is only halfway between a total failure and squeaking by! It also means you hit the success threshold easier.
The thing I like about this is that it allows for partial results and building momentum rather than pass/fail.
Monday, August 5, 2019
Rough encumbrance, no math
Encumbrance is more about what you're carrying than how much. Sure, you could stuff a backpack with trinkets and junk and jaunt about with it, but our adventurers are also wearing armor, carrying weapons and torches, with bows and shields slung over them, with belts and bandoliers of scrolls and bottles and daggers. Also they're expected to be nimble and make successful saving throws, including swinging on ropes, climbing cliffs, and swimming. Rarely is pack weight taken into consideration, and when it is it's in the form of counting. Math isn't a fun game to play at the table.
Realistically a person can carry about 20% their body weight without becoming exhausted, this is about 25-30 pounds for most people. Remember that the heavier you are the more of your own body weight you're carrying around by default, so that counts for something too. A larger person isn't necessarily capable of carrying more than a small person over a span of time, even if they're capable of exerting more force in one go.
I appreciate the granularity of weight-based encumbrance, but it could use some simplification. If you don't think about stuff like this much it has a tendency to slip through the cracks. Having traveled for many years on foot I'm quite aware that carrying much of anything for extended periods of time is exhausting. If you aren't a hiker I ask that you try it for a weekend. You'll quickly realize something you've been missing from your games. I ask my players about their encumbrance every time they try to do anything that requires mobility, and any time they collect treasure. It's just innate in me because I know it matters.
You could probably hike around in a dungeon all day wearing plate mail if you carried nothing but your weapons, but at the end of the day you'd be desperate to get that stuff off. Traveling overland wearing plate mail is out of the question unless you're mounted, and even then you're going to be sweaty and achy. It takes a lifetime of conditioning to do the things knights could do in plate mail, and even they struggled.
There's this video of a guy training like Jean Le Maingre aka Boucicault, running around doing exercises to condition his body for wearing plate mail. Shit is 26kg or about 60#s. He seems to have pretty good mobility, the joints are all well articulated, but you can tell he's struggling. He has a hard time getting up on the wooden horse, and he runs at a slow trot.
I assume that any fighter or cleric that wanted to survive to second level would perform training like this. This explains why magic-users can't just throw on plate mail and cast spells and get the same benefit as fighters--it's physically and mentally exhausting, requires peak physical ability, and such constant conditioning leaves little time for the immense study regimen required to cast even the most basic spells. Fighters are medieval knights, and magic-users are medieval monks. A monk would probably struggle just knowing how to don the harness, much less how to move efficiently in it. Saying a magic-user could wear armor might be equivalent to saying that anybody with two hands can drive a car, except it's a 60# car you wear on your body.
In the video he's shown climbing an artificial rock wall. This isn't analogous to climbing an actual rock wall, as the hand-holds are large and designed for climbing. I figure the rough uneven surface of a stone tower or cliffside would be a much different experience.
I would call plate mail heavily encumbering. If you're wearing it I'd probably cut the encumbrance weight in half, say 30#, because of how the harness conforms to your body. Nobody except Shiva has enough arms to carry all that shit around though. You either wear plate mail or leave it behind.
On the other hand, a chainmail hauberk is about 20# and they're relatively comfortable to wear. The weight it definitely noticeable but it balances well across your body well and you get pretty used to it just wearing it a lot. Unless you assume 'chainmail' means the full suit, not just the hauberk, in which case it would be as heavy and encumbering as plate mail. It's harder to explain why a magic-user can't wear chainmail and still cast spells, unless you believe that stuff about metal interfering with magical auras.
Or if you're down to say "this is a game, you guys play as 'archetypes', weapon and armor restrictions exist to help differentiate the classes, since you're supposed to work as a team."
The Rules
Okay so let's make something gameable out of all this. The following system works nicely as it fits with the Armor Class steps (10, 12, 14, 16) and movement rates (120, 90, 60, 30)
Encumbrance is about your load, how big a pack you're carrying, what you're weighted down with. Traveling on foot much of anything is encumbering, so we'll do this in batches.
Wearing nothing, you're totally unencumbered. You can do flips and jumps and polevault over pirahnas. You can remain unencumbered as long as you don't have a backpack. A grappling hook tied around you, manacles for a belt, a dagger in your shoe, some scrolls tucked into a secret pocket in your jerkin, a 6 foot staff in one hand, you're unencumbered. I'll even let you take a pouch belt or bandolier for holding little stuff like jewelry, specialists tools, a couple bombs, rations, or potions. This is where thieves and mages should be to get the most of their abilities.
If you're carrying a backpack of gear or treasure, leather armor, a couple of weapons or whatever, up to roughly 25# you're lightly encumbered. We might take your stuff into account a bit when it comes, particularly if you have to swim or climb or balance. Dropping your backpack is a free action but you lose initiative. This is where adventurer-types like bards, rogues, or spellswords should be, the guys that need a few extra things and look cool doing it. Also, it's where everybody should be if they're doing overland travel.
Alternatively you could outsource the carrying of stuff (in order of disposability) to slaves, donkeys, porters, lighterlads, or henchmen.
If you've got a bunch of gear, medium armor, and a large weapon you can't just tuck away, like a battle axe or a halberd or a shield, over 25# of stuff, you're encumbered. Subtract 1 from your dexterity bonus. Your maximum move speed is reduced one step (eg 120' to 90'). You can still do athletic things, but you're at a disadvantage.
If you've got over 50# of stuff, wearing plate mail, carrying a halberd, a shield, a sword, five daggers, and a bandolier of bombs, you're heavily encumbered. Subtract 2 from your dexterity bonus, your move speed is reduced two steps (120' to 60'). You can't cast spells, can't swim, you can't jump, you can barely climb, and you have to remove your armor (which takes like 20 minutes) to do any of that stuff and trail it behind you on a rope or small raft or donkey. Fighters and clerics do their best loaded out like this, but it shouldn't be their job to do delicate tasks or carry loot or gear.
Carrying more than this you're basically fucked & you can't run or fight at all, you're stuck at a 30' move speed, and you roll with disadvantage on everything. This includes carrying a wounded party member on your back, hobbling around with a serious illness or injury, or something equally taxing.
Bulky items are important to remember here. Brocade tapestries, bolts of moonwool, rare paintings, large weapons, fat sacks of gold are all bulky and hard to manage. Carrying two increases your Encumbrance rating.
Also, torches have a 1 in 6 chance of going out each turn when dropped, but lanterns only check once when they fall (but they shatter and catch on fire).
A gold dinar weighed 4.25 grams. There's 453.5 grams in a pound. Thus 100 gold pieces is about a pound. I would call 'a fat sack of gold' somewhere between 10 and 15 pounds, something that's gonna get in your way and jangle around and throw you off balance. Thus ~1200 gold is encumbering. If a player asks me "I have 1120 gold, does that count as bulky?" my answer would be yes. If you're not sure, the answer is yes. Carrying around shit is exhausting. Small treasures can be valued in coin sizes. Whole 10s numbers are good, so 1, 10, 20, 50, 100, but who has time for that? If I look at your equipment list and my eyes glaze over you're encumbered.
Seriously. On my last hitchhiking adventure I carried, on my person, a guitar, a change of clothes, a gallon of water, a book, a ball of twine, a knife, 2 cans of sardines, 150' of paracord, a 10x12 tarp, a pair of vicegrips, a tiny cook stove & a canister of propane, a titanium spork, and a tiny aluminum pot. Shit was 25# not counting the guitar (my weapon and shield) and it was awful. I wanted to throw it all in the garbage and go naked. This was also my lightest pack.
Really this comes down to conversing with the players, which is really a lot of my DMing, and it works best if everybody is constantly aware of it. Time, movement speed, carry weight, and torches are those things you update each turn, or each new room. "What are you carrying? Where is your stuff at?" "You have armor & a shield, that's encumbered, you'll have a hard time doing that thing"..... OR "you've got a crazy strength bonus, I think you can manage carrying the thief and his gear, and your gear on your back and climbing up this rope while goblins shoot arrows at you.........IF YOU ROLL 2 IN 6"
Nobody likes counting stuff in the heat of the moment at the table, so it's best just to gauge it and say encumbered or not. Real life works more like this. When it doubt, you're encumbered.
This starts looking a lot like the Slot system in Knave, which I'm a fan of. Problem here is what consitutes a slot? Is a weird scroll we found a slot? Is this bronze necklace a slot?
One thing I like about it is that the best armor is like 4 slots, so nobody uses it. Everybody goes with the lightest stuff. This is good because it models reality. If you're an adventurer in a dangerous place you want to be light because running away is better than dying.
Movement speed
Since 10 minute exploration lengths assume everybody is sneaking around, testing the environment, taking breaks now and then, your encumbrance doesn't have much of an effect here. You can be all kitted out and still move at a slow pace. Once you have to hide or move quickly or climb a boulder or act at once, that's when the weight really becomes a burden. Burdened people also roll with disadvantage on initiative.
BONUS ROUND: Why does plate mail even exist?
Plate mail in the real world developed quickly in response to primitive firearms. Our world doesn't have firearms, because it has fireball throwing shadowmancers so who cares about boom-boom smoke powder, so why does it exist? The answer is monsters.
Shielding your whole body with metal plates is a great idea when ogres are trying to twist you in half and fiendish otherworldly wargs slink in the shadows of any given forest. The armor in our world developed in order to protect warriors against such things.
Because this is a fantastical world of magic we can assume our armor is of a different technological strain than the real world variety. The articulation is better, they can make it lighter, they can meld together materials that don't exist in our world. They can put spells on it that help resist certain types of damage.
But that golden age when knights sallied forth to do battle with evil is long gone. The age of Law is over and the Age of Chaos encroaches on us from every direction. Technological advancement has ended and all those ancient ways are lost and mysterious. Humanity is dwindling and growing stupid and demons are becoming more common. Modern smiths can't make armor like them of yore, they can only imitate it, and rare expensive materials are hard to come by because no major trade routes exist.
Thus the plain old expensive plate you buy at Bigtown is just iron riveted together as best they can figure. It might even be heavier and worse than the stuff they made in the real world.
The REAL good stuff, the ancient magical protection, is a true treasure. If a king or vizcount owns a suit it will be their pride and joy, kept locked behind magewalls and wyrmfire. A pretty-looking imitation will be commissioned to be worn on parades. The only time they'll really bring it out is during war.
Wearing this stuff around will get you attention, both good and bad, unless you use illusions to hide its magnificence, and even then Truly Powerful armor demands to be seen and will resent being hidden.
If you wear recognizably magical or ancient armor knights and lords will give you difference, and bribers, swindlers, cutthroats, and renegade barons will demand your hide. Patrons will flock to you, archwizards will scry you, thieves guilds will drool, and assassin cult will conspire.
The same, though, is true for wielding magic weaponry or powerful spells. Carrying this shit around in public is equivalent to carrying around grenades and sniper rifles in our world. People are terrified, the panopticon will turn its eye towards you, and trouble woe and riches follow you everywhere.
Magical armor has a great chance of being lighter than the above stated encumbrances, but it comes with other costs.
Realistically a person can carry about 20% their body weight without becoming exhausted, this is about 25-30 pounds for most people. Remember that the heavier you are the more of your own body weight you're carrying around by default, so that counts for something too. A larger person isn't necessarily capable of carrying more than a small person over a span of time, even if they're capable of exerting more force in one go.
I appreciate the granularity of weight-based encumbrance, but it could use some simplification. If you don't think about stuff like this much it has a tendency to slip through the cracks. Having traveled for many years on foot I'm quite aware that carrying much of anything for extended periods of time is exhausting. If you aren't a hiker I ask that you try it for a weekend. You'll quickly realize something you've been missing from your games. I ask my players about their encumbrance every time they try to do anything that requires mobility, and any time they collect treasure. It's just innate in me because I know it matters.
You could probably hike around in a dungeon all day wearing plate mail if you carried nothing but your weapons, but at the end of the day you'd be desperate to get that stuff off. Traveling overland wearing plate mail is out of the question unless you're mounted, and even then you're going to be sweaty and achy. It takes a lifetime of conditioning to do the things knights could do in plate mail, and even they struggled.
There's this video of a guy training like Jean Le Maingre aka Boucicault, running around doing exercises to condition his body for wearing plate mail. Shit is 26kg or about 60#s. He seems to have pretty good mobility, the joints are all well articulated, but you can tell he's struggling. He has a hard time getting up on the wooden horse, and he runs at a slow trot.
I assume that any fighter or cleric that wanted to survive to second level would perform training like this. This explains why magic-users can't just throw on plate mail and cast spells and get the same benefit as fighters--it's physically and mentally exhausting, requires peak physical ability, and such constant conditioning leaves little time for the immense study regimen required to cast even the most basic spells. Fighters are medieval knights, and magic-users are medieval monks. A monk would probably struggle just knowing how to don the harness, much less how to move efficiently in it. Saying a magic-user could wear armor might be equivalent to saying that anybody with two hands can drive a car, except it's a 60# car you wear on your body.
In the video he's shown climbing an artificial rock wall. This isn't analogous to climbing an actual rock wall, as the hand-holds are large and designed for climbing. I figure the rough uneven surface of a stone tower or cliffside would be a much different experience.
I would call plate mail heavily encumbering. If you're wearing it I'd probably cut the encumbrance weight in half, say 30#, because of how the harness conforms to your body. Nobody except Shiva has enough arms to carry all that shit around though. You either wear plate mail or leave it behind.
On the other hand, a chainmail hauberk is about 20# and they're relatively comfortable to wear. The weight it definitely noticeable but it balances well across your body well and you get pretty used to it just wearing it a lot. Unless you assume 'chainmail' means the full suit, not just the hauberk, in which case it would be as heavy and encumbering as plate mail. It's harder to explain why a magic-user can't wear chainmail and still cast spells, unless you believe that stuff about metal interfering with magical auras.
Or if you're down to say "this is a game, you guys play as 'archetypes', weapon and armor restrictions exist to help differentiate the classes, since you're supposed to work as a team."
The Rules
Okay so let's make something gameable out of all this. The following system works nicely as it fits with the Armor Class steps (10, 12, 14, 16) and movement rates (120, 90, 60, 30)
Encumbrance is about your load, how big a pack you're carrying, what you're weighted down with. Traveling on foot much of anything is encumbering, so we'll do this in batches.
Wearing nothing, you're totally unencumbered. You can do flips and jumps and polevault over pirahnas. You can remain unencumbered as long as you don't have a backpack. A grappling hook tied around you, manacles for a belt, a dagger in your shoe, some scrolls tucked into a secret pocket in your jerkin, a 6 foot staff in one hand, you're unencumbered. I'll even let you take a pouch belt or bandolier for holding little stuff like jewelry, specialists tools, a couple bombs, rations, or potions. This is where thieves and mages should be to get the most of their abilities.
If you're carrying a backpack of gear or treasure, leather armor, a couple of weapons or whatever, up to roughly 25# you're lightly encumbered. We might take your stuff into account a bit when it comes, particularly if you have to swim or climb or balance. Dropping your backpack is a free action but you lose initiative. This is where adventurer-types like bards, rogues, or spellswords should be, the guys that need a few extra things and look cool doing it. Also, it's where everybody should be if they're doing overland travel.
Alternatively you could outsource the carrying of stuff (in order of disposability) to slaves, donkeys, porters, lighterlads, or henchmen.
If you've got a bunch of gear, medium armor, and a large weapon you can't just tuck away, like a battle axe or a halberd or a shield, over 25# of stuff, you're encumbered. Subtract 1 from your dexterity bonus. Your maximum move speed is reduced one step (eg 120' to 90'). You can still do athletic things, but you're at a disadvantage.
If you've got over 50# of stuff, wearing plate mail, carrying a halberd, a shield, a sword, five daggers, and a bandolier of bombs, you're heavily encumbered. Subtract 2 from your dexterity bonus, your move speed is reduced two steps (120' to 60'). You can't cast spells, can't swim, you can't jump, you can barely climb, and you have to remove your armor (which takes like 20 minutes) to do any of that stuff and trail it behind you on a rope or small raft or donkey. Fighters and clerics do their best loaded out like this, but it shouldn't be their job to do delicate tasks or carry loot or gear.
Carrying more than this you're basically fucked & you can't run or fight at all, you're stuck at a 30' move speed, and you roll with disadvantage on everything. This includes carrying a wounded party member on your back, hobbling around with a serious illness or injury, or something equally taxing.
Bulky items are important to remember here. Brocade tapestries, bolts of moonwool, rare paintings, large weapons, fat sacks of gold are all bulky and hard to manage. Carrying two increases your Encumbrance rating.
Also, torches have a 1 in 6 chance of going out each turn when dropped, but lanterns only check once when they fall (but they shatter and catch on fire).
A gold dinar weighed 4.25 grams. There's 453.5 grams in a pound. Thus 100 gold pieces is about a pound. I would call 'a fat sack of gold' somewhere between 10 and 15 pounds, something that's gonna get in your way and jangle around and throw you off balance. Thus ~1200 gold is encumbering. If a player asks me "I have 1120 gold, does that count as bulky?" my answer would be yes. If you're not sure, the answer is yes. Carrying around shit is exhausting. Small treasures can be valued in coin sizes. Whole 10s numbers are good, so 1, 10, 20, 50, 100, but who has time for that? If I look at your equipment list and my eyes glaze over you're encumbered.
Seriously. On my last hitchhiking adventure I carried, on my person, a guitar, a change of clothes, a gallon of water, a book, a ball of twine, a knife, 2 cans of sardines, 150' of paracord, a 10x12 tarp, a pair of vicegrips, a tiny cook stove & a canister of propane, a titanium spork, and a tiny aluminum pot. Shit was 25# not counting the guitar (my weapon and shield) and it was awful. I wanted to throw it all in the garbage and go naked. This was also my lightest pack.
Really this comes down to conversing with the players, which is really a lot of my DMing, and it works best if everybody is constantly aware of it. Time, movement speed, carry weight, and torches are those things you update each turn, or each new room. "What are you carrying? Where is your stuff at?" "You have armor & a shield, that's encumbered, you'll have a hard time doing that thing"..... OR "you've got a crazy strength bonus, I think you can manage carrying the thief and his gear, and your gear on your back and climbing up this rope while goblins shoot arrows at you.........IF YOU ROLL 2 IN 6"
Nobody likes counting stuff in the heat of the moment at the table, so it's best just to gauge it and say encumbered or not. Real life works more like this. When it doubt, you're encumbered.
This starts looking a lot like the Slot system in Knave, which I'm a fan of. Problem here is what consitutes a slot? Is a weird scroll we found a slot? Is this bronze necklace a slot?
One thing I like about it is that the best armor is like 4 slots, so nobody uses it. Everybody goes with the lightest stuff. This is good because it models reality. If you're an adventurer in a dangerous place you want to be light because running away is better than dying.
Movement speed
Since 10 minute exploration lengths assume everybody is sneaking around, testing the environment, taking breaks now and then, your encumbrance doesn't have much of an effect here. You can be all kitted out and still move at a slow pace. Once you have to hide or move quickly or climb a boulder or act at once, that's when the weight really becomes a burden. Burdened people also roll with disadvantage on initiative.
BONUS ROUND: Why does plate mail even exist?
Plate mail in the real world developed quickly in response to primitive firearms. Our world doesn't have firearms, because it has fireball throwing shadowmancers so who cares about boom-boom smoke powder, so why does it exist? The answer is monsters.
Shielding your whole body with metal plates is a great idea when ogres are trying to twist you in half and fiendish otherworldly wargs slink in the shadows of any given forest. The armor in our world developed in order to protect warriors against such things.
Because this is a fantastical world of magic we can assume our armor is of a different technological strain than the real world variety. The articulation is better, they can make it lighter, they can meld together materials that don't exist in our world. They can put spells on it that help resist certain types of damage.
But that golden age when knights sallied forth to do battle with evil is long gone. The age of Law is over and the Age of Chaos encroaches on us from every direction. Technological advancement has ended and all those ancient ways are lost and mysterious. Humanity is dwindling and growing stupid and demons are becoming more common. Modern smiths can't make armor like them of yore, they can only imitate it, and rare expensive materials are hard to come by because no major trade routes exist.
Thus the plain old expensive plate you buy at Bigtown is just iron riveted together as best they can figure. It might even be heavier and worse than the stuff they made in the real world.
The REAL good stuff, the ancient magical protection, is a true treasure. If a king or vizcount owns a suit it will be their pride and joy, kept locked behind magewalls and wyrmfire. A pretty-looking imitation will be commissioned to be worn on parades. The only time they'll really bring it out is during war.
Wearing this stuff around will get you attention, both good and bad, unless you use illusions to hide its magnificence, and even then Truly Powerful armor demands to be seen and will resent being hidden.
If you wear recognizably magical or ancient armor knights and lords will give you difference, and bribers, swindlers, cutthroats, and renegade barons will demand your hide. Patrons will flock to you, archwizards will scry you, thieves guilds will drool, and assassin cult will conspire.
The same, though, is true for wielding magic weaponry or powerful spells. Carrying this shit around in public is equivalent to carrying around grenades and sniper rifles in our world. People are terrified, the panopticon will turn its eye towards you, and trouble woe and riches follow you everywhere.
Magical armor has a great chance of being lighter than the above stated encumbrances, but it comes with other costs.
Saturday, August 3, 2019
Starving in the dungeon
Everything get simplified. Everything that's not in the book gets adjudicated. Lots of moving parts that requires extra tables and chart referencing is too much stuff to keep track of. Since your character's survival is predicated on their HP all of the bad shit that you suffer should affect their ability to stay alive and recover from combat.
Eating food is healing
At the end of the day you have to eat food and get some sleep to recover one HD hp. If you don't do both of those things you don't get to recover. It's that simple. If you don't sleep at all you roll with disadvantage on everything until you get sleep. You can go hungry as long as you want, but those hp won't come back til you eat so it's self-regulating. If a PC eats their favorite food they roll with advantage when healing.
In the wilderness you can roll bushcrafting checks to see if you find food, 4 hours per check. This works better if you're familiar with the locality/climate/denizens, or if you're a skilled hunter or tracker. Most of the time bushcrafting stuff is related to Wis. Being skilled gives you bonus points. The less fruitful the clime the harder the check.
Raw meat keeps for about a day or two. Adventurers have pretty hardened stomachs and can survive eating mostly funky stuff. If you cook it it'll keep for a few days. If you find some way to preserve it, like with salt or some kind of mild edible acid, it'll keep indefinitely. If it's definitely rancid the PC will smell it, but everything underground smells rancid.
If you make a meal by combining ingredients everybody eating it gets some +1s to healing based on complexity and deliciousness. Probably it won't be delicious though because you're eating goblins and giant slugs. I'm talking like if someone managed to find or bring something palatable into the dungeon, that normal people eat. Like blood sausage or pickled octopus.
What about in the dungeon?
Finding food underground has to be roleplayed because it's not just lying around like it is in the normal world. If another monster doesn't eat it, the dungeon itself will. You could try eating that slime growing from that drainage pipe. Catch a rat. Gnaw some old bones. Mostly you're gonna have to eat monsters. Hope you brought some cooking gear.
How long does it keep?
The surface levels of the dungeon probably has stuff that's kind of like the stuff in our world and obeys things similar to our rules. It keeps for 1-3 days usually.
The deeper you go the more the rules breakdown. Deep underground reality becomes toxic. Wounds turn septic quickly, diseases spread fast, and everything rots into goo and is consumed by something else within hours, like in a jungle made of hate. By the next day dead things are typically mummified or transformed into putrefied ichor. You have to eat it then and there.
Is this thing gonna make me sick?The answer is probably yes. When eating monsters make a Con or Poison save. If you fail you get sick. Either roll with disadvantage for a while or don't heal your HP or take some stat damage or be completely immobile while you hallucinate and scream and vomit for 2d20 hours. If somebody is a healer of some kind and has access to herbs and can explain what herbs their using and how, they can make a Int check to see if you get better. Then they mark off a use of their herbs.
Disease and mutations
are more or less the same thing to me. The difference is if it's curable or not. Diseases do stat damage and get worse, but probably you'll also get scales or feathers or start rotting or your tongue will turn into a hand and start trying to choke you. Probably worms will crawl out of your anus at night and be so itchy you can't sleep, or your genitals turn black and shriveled, or you'll get a crystallizing rash that spreads. It depends on the thing you eat, whatever that thing is like is what happens to you. You don't turn INTO that thing, but consuming its essence starts having an effect on your DNA. You might be able to cure it by eating more of whatever you ate, but that's probably just be an old wives tale. Maybe your god can hear your prayers all the way down here, and they care enough to listen.
Underground cookbooks
They exist but they're mostly written as jokes by charlatans and taking them seriously could get you killed or worse. Drow don't write cookbooks because drow don't eat food, they have highly trained slaves to brew mixtures of purified essence for aesthetic pleasure, like extractive of the colors a sentient being views as it dies while being tortured, the more subtle and wordless the better. Stuff underground mostly just kills and eats everything it can find without concern for taste. If there are any sources for what's good underground they're written by other adventurers in barely legible script as part of their logs, and can be found on their dead bodies.
Can we get fancy?
You can get as fancy as you want, but it's not going to help your situation. This isn't "Delicious in Dungeon". You're eating stuff that still want you dead even in death. This stuff isn't part of the natural world, there is no food chain or ecology down here. Monsters sprout from each other's nightmares, through rips in aetheric space, or spontaneously generate from mucous touching ashes or septic neck wounds. You're ingesting pure cardinal sin, ire, hate, greed, and venom. It tastes and smells like sewage, turns into a hard knot that blocks your intestines, and your body has no idea what to do with it. Its chemistry is not even of this world.
What about cannibalism?
Probably your safest bet, really. Stuff from your world isn't inherently toxic. You might go crazy eating people though. Veins of the Earth handles this nicely.
I didn't bring a cookpot... Can I hollow out this huge skull and brew soup in that?Now you're thinking like an adventurer! You just earned a +1 on your Con save to see if that beholder brain soup shreds your mind into pieces.
The moral of the story is bring food. Bring lots of food. But food is heavy. Next I'll talk about encumbrance.
Eating food is healing
At the end of the day you have to eat food and get some sleep to recover one HD hp. If you don't do both of those things you don't get to recover. It's that simple. If you don't sleep at all you roll with disadvantage on everything until you get sleep. You can go hungry as long as you want, but those hp won't come back til you eat so it's self-regulating. If a PC eats their favorite food they roll with advantage when healing.
In the wilderness you can roll bushcrafting checks to see if you find food, 4 hours per check. This works better if you're familiar with the locality/climate/denizens, or if you're a skilled hunter or tracker. Most of the time bushcrafting stuff is related to Wis. Being skilled gives you bonus points. The less fruitful the clime the harder the check.
Raw meat keeps for about a day or two. Adventurers have pretty hardened stomachs and can survive eating mostly funky stuff. If you cook it it'll keep for a few days. If you find some way to preserve it, like with salt or some kind of mild edible acid, it'll keep indefinitely. If it's definitely rancid the PC will smell it, but everything underground smells rancid.
If you make a meal by combining ingredients everybody eating it gets some +1s to healing based on complexity and deliciousness. Probably it won't be delicious though because you're eating goblins and giant slugs. I'm talking like if someone managed to find or bring something palatable into the dungeon, that normal people eat. Like blood sausage or pickled octopus.
What about in the dungeon?
Finding food underground has to be roleplayed because it's not just lying around like it is in the normal world. If another monster doesn't eat it, the dungeon itself will. You could try eating that slime growing from that drainage pipe. Catch a rat. Gnaw some old bones. Mostly you're gonna have to eat monsters. Hope you brought some cooking gear.
How long does it keep?
The surface levels of the dungeon probably has stuff that's kind of like the stuff in our world and obeys things similar to our rules. It keeps for 1-3 days usually.
The deeper you go the more the rules breakdown. Deep underground reality becomes toxic. Wounds turn septic quickly, diseases spread fast, and everything rots into goo and is consumed by something else within hours, like in a jungle made of hate. By the next day dead things are typically mummified or transformed into putrefied ichor. You have to eat it then and there.
Is this thing gonna make me sick?The answer is probably yes. When eating monsters make a Con or Poison save. If you fail you get sick. Either roll with disadvantage for a while or don't heal your HP or take some stat damage or be completely immobile while you hallucinate and scream and vomit for 2d20 hours. If somebody is a healer of some kind and has access to herbs and can explain what herbs their using and how, they can make a Int check to see if you get better. Then they mark off a use of their herbs.
Disease and mutations
are more or less the same thing to me. The difference is if it's curable or not. Diseases do stat damage and get worse, but probably you'll also get scales or feathers or start rotting or your tongue will turn into a hand and start trying to choke you. Probably worms will crawl out of your anus at night and be so itchy you can't sleep, or your genitals turn black and shriveled, or you'll get a crystallizing rash that spreads. It depends on the thing you eat, whatever that thing is like is what happens to you. You don't turn INTO that thing, but consuming its essence starts having an effect on your DNA. You might be able to cure it by eating more of whatever you ate, but that's probably just be an old wives tale. Maybe your god can hear your prayers all the way down here, and they care enough to listen.
Underground cookbooks
They exist but they're mostly written as jokes by charlatans and taking them seriously could get you killed or worse. Drow don't write cookbooks because drow don't eat food, they have highly trained slaves to brew mixtures of purified essence for aesthetic pleasure, like extractive of the colors a sentient being views as it dies while being tortured, the more subtle and wordless the better. Stuff underground mostly just kills and eats everything it can find without concern for taste. If there are any sources for what's good underground they're written by other adventurers in barely legible script as part of their logs, and can be found on their dead bodies.
Can we get fancy?
You can get as fancy as you want, but it's not going to help your situation. This isn't "Delicious in Dungeon". You're eating stuff that still want you dead even in death. This stuff isn't part of the natural world, there is no food chain or ecology down here. Monsters sprout from each other's nightmares, through rips in aetheric space, or spontaneously generate from mucous touching ashes or septic neck wounds. You're ingesting pure cardinal sin, ire, hate, greed, and venom. It tastes and smells like sewage, turns into a hard knot that blocks your intestines, and your body has no idea what to do with it. Its chemistry is not even of this world.
What about cannibalism?
Probably your safest bet, really. Stuff from your world isn't inherently toxic. You might go crazy eating people though. Veins of the Earth handles this nicely.
I didn't bring a cookpot... Can I hollow out this huge skull and brew soup in that?Now you're thinking like an adventurer! You just earned a +1 on your Con save to see if that beholder brain soup shreds your mind into pieces.
The moral of the story is bring food. Bring lots of food. But food is heavy. Next I'll talk about encumbrance.
What the fuck is a table?
I'm an utterly disorganized person. My ethereal form is a raucous tornado of collages, warping and changing and connecting in disproportionate amalgams. Scatterbrained doesn't even begin to cover it. I'm like a vulture-porcupine shedding worms in all directions, everywhere I go. If an assassin wanted to track me they'd only have to follow the inch-thick trail of bodily effluvient to my doorstep.
Tables are supposed to make a DM's life easier. You throw on a table for a random result to simulate the vagaries of life, or to stimulate creative juices in a way your mammalian brain wouldn't otherwise figure.
There's tables for everything. Everything is a table, from the scars on your face to the produce of a mushroom forest. The key of fun d&d experiences is randomness; even the DM should be surprised at what comes out. That's what attracts me to the game to begin with--unlimited potential and endless modularity.
I never seem to have the table I want when I need it, or I can't find it amongst the pile of paper I keep my scraps in while the players are patiently staring at me for what's going to happen. Most of the time I just scribble down d12 regurgitated insults and roll a die on it, that's my table, usually the number of things on the table don't match the faces on the die. Spur of the moment. Let's try it now:
Probably a table like this will just be the names and I'll know what it does based on a flash on insight. I dunno where the insight comes from, but even just the act of writing a table sparks something.
The expressed purpose of a table is that you roll on it and interpret the result. But it's impossible to keep track of and organize a bazillion tables for every little thing, and it's silly to try. I think the real purpose of a table is to act as a quantum cranial stimulant for moments of dire need. You're like "They rolled a crit. huh. oh yeah, that neat crit table I read once...I kind of remember a couple of result I'll throw a d6.......5? What is 5? So like, he smashes the dude's leg off with the warhammer and it goes flying and stabs another guy in the face with the broken bone okay."
I can't imagine someone actually pulling out a crit table and rolling on it to get a result. How do you keep track of all this stuff? Just make something up, something grotesque and brutal which changes the course of the fight in an unexpected way. You don't need a table for that, and the table won't give you enough information to actually go off of, you have to interpret it anyway, so just go with the fiction.
Continuing on the crit table thing, that's really what differentiates weapons in my games, since I use d6 for all damage. Axes lop off limbs, maces crush bones and armor, polearms hit first and run guys through, swords are quick, flashy and strike true, daggers are sleek and cruel, bows impale stomachs and hearts and eye cavities. I'm more likely to give a guy wielding a sword a bonus attack on an excellent roll than a guy with an axe. I don't need a table for that, I just know it in my marrow.
Tables are better for world building. It's your day off, you chugged a bunch of coffee, you guess you can deal with the consequences of ignoring all your piling-up responsibilities for one more day while you spent 6 to 8 hours frantically kludging together a nonsense world nobody will ever see. Pile together a bunch of tables and go nuts.
but oops, I forgot to save the bookmarks for all those grade A high-falutin' tables, or I can feel my energy waning at the thought of sifting through my megaplex of computerized folders, none of it organized, or I go searching and quickly get sidetracked into reading and dreaming about guild dogs for four hours and get nothing useful done. So, I'll just write my own fucking tables.
Vancian magic is a core aspect of d&d which I am unwilling to part with for this reason: The very act of being a DM is Vancian magic. You pull out all your tomes, all your weird books on Fortean history & bongo science & obscure mythology, all your graph papers and quill pens and crystals and Tibetan mantra spirals, all your nightmare journals and hallucinogenic teas and homemade musical instruments and you pack it all into your fucking brain. You sit there and you study this soup of gibberish it takes a borderline schizophrenic to comprehend and you pack it all into your skull until it's threatening to burst out through the seams. Then, during the game, you go and regurgitate it all and weave a world of mystery and magic.
Afterwards you forget all of it. You collapse exhausted. In order to do it next time, you have to do it all over again, and the more you do it, the better you get and the more stuff you can fit in there fore next time.
Tables are one small piece of the meta-fractal.
Tables are supposed to make a DM's life easier. You throw on a table for a random result to simulate the vagaries of life, or to stimulate creative juices in a way your mammalian brain wouldn't otherwise figure.
There's tables for everything. Everything is a table, from the scars on your face to the produce of a mushroom forest. The key of fun d&d experiences is randomness; even the DM should be surprised at what comes out. That's what attracts me to the game to begin with--unlimited potential and endless modularity.
I never seem to have the table I want when I need it, or I can't find it amongst the pile of paper I keep my scraps in while the players are patiently staring at me for what's going to happen. Most of the time I just scribble down d12 regurgitated insults and roll a die on it, that's my table, usually the number of things on the table don't match the faces on the die. Spur of the moment. Let's try it now:
 | |
| never critically fail a bushcrafting throw in my universe |
Dangers of foraging in the fungal forest
- white spore ball, oozes cyan pus when cut. Everything that gets its spores on it will grow more spore balls in d4+1 days.
- evergrowing cornhats. straw yellow stalks w brown hates. Grows magnificently fast and tall. Tastes of blood and celery. Nourishing, but gives you horrible numbing premonitions when your body dumps adrenaline for d3 days.
- Squat eyed maroon. Hums a geometric tune. Grows by water source. Very bouncy. Turns into slime on contact with water and begins to crawl away into a dark hole where it can sporulate. Hunks of it can be attached to wounds which will regenerate within hours. Afterwards, if the user dies, their body is taken over by the purple jelly and they run away.
- beige skullpoppies. Shaped like yellow skulls growing out of the ground. Wizardsight gives them fleshy faces. Will talk to those touched by fey and know things that all other skullcaps in the forest see. Desire the contents of stomachs for nourishment. Eventually grows into a fullsized skeleton and begins searching for flesh.
- Boulderbloat. Car or house sized boulder funguses, hard as rocks. Gnomes often carve their homes into them. Occassionally they grow legs and start walking around. They have a mutually beneficial relationship: Gnomes get a house and boulderbloats get wee little magical gardeners to dote on. Humans that spend too much time around boulderbloats grow spiraling glowing blue lines on their bodies and sprout antennas, eventually growing a boulderbloat out of their back and becoming one.
- Carnagecage. Look like large ribcages filled with diseased intestines. Animals are driven to eat it. Ribcage snaps closed on anything that touches its soft inner jellies, which it digests & transforms into a budding spore stalk. The sporestalks of this fungus make a great tea which calms nerves & invigorates senses. Highly addictive
- Pukebush. A throbbing bush-sized welt of ectoplasmic goop. Grows blue pustules that contain its spores. Contact with spores causes uncontrollable vomiting, with the possibility of vomiting forth one's intestines. If the pukebush is burned it releases a toxic smoke that enrages animals of the forest. At the core of a pukebush is a bezoar which is the main constituent of a trans-dimensional prophylactic
- Virulant Beneficter. A human shaped mushroom, white and blue. Ingesting the virulant beneficter fills one with a sense of duty & higher purpose of the Lawful Good kind. Overwhelming desire to help those in need. Hallucinations last d20+4 hours after which ingester falls into a misanthropic stupor.
Probably a table like this will just be the names and I'll know what it does based on a flash on insight. I dunno where the insight comes from, but even just the act of writing a table sparks something.
The expressed purpose of a table is that you roll on it and interpret the result. But it's impossible to keep track of and organize a bazillion tables for every little thing, and it's silly to try. I think the real purpose of a table is to act as a quantum cranial stimulant for moments of dire need. You're like "They rolled a crit. huh. oh yeah, that neat crit table I read once...I kind of remember a couple of result I'll throw a d6.......5? What is 5? So like, he smashes the dude's leg off with the warhammer and it goes flying and stabs another guy in the face with the broken bone okay."
I can't imagine someone actually pulling out a crit table and rolling on it to get a result. How do you keep track of all this stuff? Just make something up, something grotesque and brutal which changes the course of the fight in an unexpected way. You don't need a table for that, and the table won't give you enough information to actually go off of, you have to interpret it anyway, so just go with the fiction.
Continuing on the crit table thing, that's really what differentiates weapons in my games, since I use d6 for all damage. Axes lop off limbs, maces crush bones and armor, polearms hit first and run guys through, swords are quick, flashy and strike true, daggers are sleek and cruel, bows impale stomachs and hearts and eye cavities. I'm more likely to give a guy wielding a sword a bonus attack on an excellent roll than a guy with an axe. I don't need a table for that, I just know it in my marrow.
Tables are better for world building. It's your day off, you chugged a bunch of coffee, you guess you can deal with the consequences of ignoring all your piling-up responsibilities for one more day while you spent 6 to 8 hours frantically kludging together a nonsense world nobody will ever see. Pile together a bunch of tables and go nuts.
but oops, I forgot to save the bookmarks for all those grade A high-falutin' tables, or I can feel my energy waning at the thought of sifting through my megaplex of computerized folders, none of it organized, or I go searching and quickly get sidetracked into reading and dreaming about guild dogs for four hours and get nothing useful done. So, I'll just write my own fucking tables.
Vancian magic is a core aspect of d&d which I am unwilling to part with for this reason: The very act of being a DM is Vancian magic. You pull out all your tomes, all your weird books on Fortean history & bongo science & obscure mythology, all your graph papers and quill pens and crystals and Tibetan mantra spirals, all your nightmare journals and hallucinogenic teas and homemade musical instruments and you pack it all into your fucking brain. You sit there and you study this soup of gibberish it takes a borderline schizophrenic to comprehend and you pack it all into your skull until it's threatening to burst out through the seams. Then, during the game, you go and regurgitate it all and weave a world of mystery and magic.
Afterwards you forget all of it. You collapse exhausted. In order to do it next time, you have to do it all over again, and the more you do it, the better you get and the more stuff you can fit in there fore next time.
Tables are one small piece of the meta-fractal.
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