November 2007
"Once there was a golden age, but since the great Fantasy Heartbreak, they call their land Generica." - Melle, RPGNet (on Ed Greenwood's Castlemourn) |
November 5th, 2007
d20 +
cleric turning level + Charisma modifier These optional rules try to address these problems in three ways: This high variability is combated in two ways: I've been using these rules with great success in my campaigns for more than half a decade now. | | Link |
November 27th, 2007
ALIVE: You are alive as long as your current hit points are above your death threshold. Unless you have stabilized (see below), you take 1 hp of damage per round while disabled. The first set of changes I put into place was the removal of raise dead, resurrection, and similar spells. The motivation here was relatively simple: I don't like the revolving door of death. Death is a powerful and dramatic event... unless, of course, it happens at the gaming table. At the gaming table it's usually a joke. Or, at worst, a minor inconvenience. This problem of flavor goes beyond de-valuing the meaning of death. With even a modicum of logical thought, it completely changes the nature of the game world. At the most obvious level, you will never have a story which begins "when the old king died in the Battle of Batok's Pass". You also have to realize that assassination becomes almost pointless: In such a world, the country doesn't go into mourning when JFK is shot in Dallas... it criticizes him for being a narcissistic slacker when he refuses to respond to the raise dead spell. It gets more severe (and more bizarre) from there. These kinds of thought experiments and what-if games can certainly have interesting results. But I'll confess that I'm generally looking for something that looks a bit more like Middle Earth and a lot less like transhumanist fantasy (which sounds like a fascinating, albeit largely untapped, sub-genre). So I got rid of raise dead. But this creates a new problem: It's a lethal game. And I like combat to be risky. Combining risky combat with an absolute barrier between life and death will result in a lot of new characters being rolled up. The revolving door may be gone, but death still becomes de-valued because players stop investing themselves in characters they know have the life expectancy of tissue paper in a blast furnace. More precisely, I didn't want to increase the actual lethality of the game (measured in characters permanently removed from gameplay). Nor did I want to decrease the challenges of the game. I needed to shift the flavor without shifting the gameplay. The solution was to re-imagine what the -10 hit point barrier meant: It was still a death of the body, but not a departure of the soul. Thus, clerics could use their divine healing to bring back even those whose bodies had been punished beyond the point of natural healing. The result is a mechanic that looks a bit more like an emergency room resuscitation than Jesus rising from the dead. This is a subtle change, but one that removes the flavor problems that come from a hero's spirit constantly yo-yoing between this world and the next.
LOW-LEVEL LETHALITY For many years, this was the only change I made to the death and dying rules. Playtesting did reveal a few problem areas that needed to be dealt with, but for the most part these rules worked and worked well. One early discovery was that Constitution damage had suddenly become much more horrible. In the standard game, the difference between dying from Constitution damage and dying from hit point damage was non-existent: In either case, you needed a raise dead spell to bring you back. But, under the new rules, hit point damage could simply be healed through spontaneous casting whereas Constitution damage would frequently require a prepared restoration spell... at which point the character's moldering corpse would have accrued a huge tally of negative hit points. This led to the simple expedient of allowing clerics to also spontaneously cast restoration spells. The other effect of this rule change was to smooth out the differences between low- and mid-level play. Using the standard rules, low-level characters have a practical barrier between life-and-death. While they might theoretically be raised from the dead, in practice the party lacks the resources to afford a raise dead spell. Plus, given the low-levels involved, there's a minimal investment in the existing character and a minimal time commitment required to roll up a new character. And then, for a few levels, coming back from the dead becomes a possibility, but an expensive one: The cost of getting the spell cast will seriously deplete the party's resources. And then death becomes a speed bump. This is one of the things that leads to the perception that low-level play is so much more difficult and lethal than high-level play: Not only do you have a smaller pool of hit points and a smaller margin for error, but the barrier between life-and-death still exists -- so death is death and you're not coming back. Under these house rules, on the other hand, this continuum is made a little less extreme: Low-level characters can hit -10 and still be brought back.
HIGH-LEVEL LETHALITY Speaking of that -10 barrier, we come to a widely-recognized shortcoming in mid- and high-level play: The tougher you become, the more likely you are to die than you are to fall unconscious. Why? Because, as the average damage inflicted by any given blow increases, the chance that any given blow will catapult you directly from positive hit points to negative hit points and death increases. For example, if you suffer a blow for 5 hp there is no chance that you'll be immediately killed by it. If you're suffering blows doing an average of 25 hp, on the other hand, the odds drastically increase for such an opportunity. The solution for this is to increase the number of negative hit points a higher level character can suffer before actually dying. And the simplest solution for this is to give everyone the same number of hit points below 0 as they do above 0.
DECOUPLING DYING Finally, I had a desire to decouple unconsciousness and dying. There are a couple of reasons for this: First, one of the shortcomings of the game has always been its inability to handle a person's "dying words" or "final effort". It's a literary classic: The dying man exerts just enough energy to whisper, "Your mother yet lives!" or "Rosebud!" or "From hell's teeth I spit at you!" Or perhaps the dying heroine manages to hold onto the detonation device until her companions have escaped. But, in the game, a dying character is always unconscious -- and thus unable of uttering dying words, making a final heroic gesture, or anything else. They can't even bandage their own wounds. Second, I've always liked the mechanics for being disabled: There's something dramatic about a wound so severe that taking any strenuous action is literally making your wounds worse. It forces a desperate, bleeding retreat; or it offers the hero a chance to grit their teeth and achieve something remarkable; or it leaves the villain staggering as the hero surges forward for their triumph. But, unfortunately, the disabled condition only happens when a character lands precisely at 0 hit points. And then it only lasts for, at most, a single round before they keel over into unconsciousness. Both of these problems can be solved by decoupling dying and unconsciousness, as shown in the house rules. And, as ancillary benefit, this mechanic also allows the dying condition to serve as a "warning track" of sorts. Instead of just plugging away at full power until, suddenly, the character is completely out of it, now a PC is more likely to enter the dying state and be able to do something about it: Bind their wounds. Call out for the cleric. Gulp down a healing potion.
THE PROBLEM OF UNCONSCIOUSNESS One problem I haven't solved yet is the problem of unconsciousness. More specifically, the problem of waking someone up who has been unconscious. In real life, if someone gets knocked unconscious you can frequently (but not always) wake them up again by slapping them, throwing water in their face, or waving smelling salts under their nose. In the game, however, this doesn't work. If you've hurt someone enough to knock them unconscious, the only thing you can do is either (a) magically heal them or (b) wait a very long time for them to naturally heal some damage. This is a shortcoming, as my players frequently want to model that narrative conceit of slapping a prisoner awake so that they can question them. (Ironically, this can only drive them deeper into unconsciousness using the rules.) Unfortunately, I haven't figured out any particularly good way (and a simple way) to overcome this shortcoming. Anyone have thoughts on the matter? | | Link |
November 28th, 2007
4th EDITION - THOUGHTS ON SKILLS Recently I've been involved in several discussions regarding skills in D&D. If you don't want them, don't buy them. I bring this up because I see the same complaint leveled at 3rd Edition's skill system. "GOD, I HOPE THEY GET RID OF SKILL POINTS!" I really couldn't disagree more. The existing skill point system is the best of both worlds. The Star Wars Saga Edition method of doing things (which appears to also be the way that 4th Edition is going), on the other hand, is remarkably inferior: It gives you scenario #1... and only scenario #1. And here's the trick: It doesn't make scenario #1 any faster or easier. So by adopting the SWSE method of doing things, you're sacrificing flexibility and customization, and you're gaining... absolutely nothing.
SKILLED vs. UNSKILLED To be fair, there is another argument for adopting the SWSE system for handling skills: It eliminates the disparity between skilled and unskilled characters. The argument goes something like this: A character who specializes in the Hide skill will eventually become so skilled at hiding that a person who hasn't invested any skill points into Spot will never be able to spot them. (This happens when there is a 20-point difference between the Hide skill bonus and the Spot skill bonus -- the 1d20 roll can no longer span that difference.) SWSE solves this "problem" by turning every character into a renaissance man: Your trained skills are set to: 1d20 + 5 + character level + attribute modifier + miscellaneous modifiers Your untrained skills are set to: 1d20 + character level + attribute modifier + miscellaneous modifiers As you can see, this means that all characters become skilled in all things (with the exception of some trained-only skills). A 10th level characters is as a good at every single skill as a trained 1st level character. This does eliminate the disparity between the skill bonuses of various characters... but it also means that every single character in SWSE is Doc Savage.
FIXING A FALSE PROBLEM But the real problem with SWSE's "fix" is that this disparity isn't actually a problem. This type of disparity is a problem when it comes to attack bonuses and saving throws, because those are target numbers which are fundamental to a wide array of common challenges in the game: If you've reached a point where the rogue will automatically succeed (barring a natural 1) on any saving throw the fighter has any chance of making, then it becomes increasingly difficult to design challenges for the group. But skills, in general, don't suffer from these problems.
Any problems created by disparities between skilled and non-skilled
characters can be simply addressed by:
LACK OF FLEXIBILITY But an unnecessary lack of flexibility increasingly seems to be the design methodology for 4th Edition. For example, Andy Collins recently discussed the fact that, in 4th Edition, abilities which were once feats and available to any character will now be class-specific abilities. This is one giant leap backwards for the game. Similarly, it now appears that monsters and PCs will be built on mutually incompatible frameworks. All of these things are major strikes against 4th Edition, in my opinion. Combined with decisions like removing saving throws from the game (fundamentally altering something that has been a core component of D&D gameplay for more than three decades), focusing the game exclusively on miniature-based tactical play (both in terms of removing real-world measurements from the rules and in terms of designing monsters so that they have no function outside of combat), and changes to the meta-setting of the game (something roughly akin to changing the property names in Monopoly) the prospects for 4th Edition looker bleaker and bleaker for me. It seems increasingly likely that the game is heading in the wrong direction. I'm still holding out some hope, but my suspicions are growing that I will not be making the transition from 3rd Edition to 4th Edition. | | Link |
November 29th, 2007
In order to solve both of these problems, Dream Machine Productions has created two trademark logos that can be used to indicate compatibility: The Seal of the 3rd Edition and the Seal of the 4th Edition. The Seal of the 3rd Edition is being immediately released under a free license so that anyone who wants to use it -- whether a professional company or amateur designer -- can use it freely.
Seal of the 3rd Edition Trademark License - Version 1.0 Seal of the 3rd Edition Trademark Guidelines - Version 1.0 The Seal of the 4th Edition will be released under a similar license as soon as the 4th Edition SRD becomes public. (Until the SRD of the new edition becomes public, we can't finalize the compatibility guidelines.) (EDIT: The GSL actually released for 4th Edition made this project untenable.) 4th Edition Seal - Color 4th Edition Seal - Black 4th Edition Seal - White 4th Edition Seal - Grayscale 4th Edition Seal - Full Size 4th Edition Seal - PSD File If you have questions, suggestions, or concerns, please feel free to drop me a comment or an e-mail. Similarly, if you have a need to use the Seal of the 4th Edition trademark logo before the 4th Edition SRD becomes public, simply contact me for permission. | | Link |
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