I’ve previously discussed the odd-ball interpretation I’ve been using of OD&D’s proto-system shock rules. In AD&D these rules were fully developed into the system shock and resurrection survival mechanics, but in OD&D these rules consisted entirely of a few table entries reading “60% to 90% of survival”, “40% to 50% chance of survival” and  so forth without any word of explanation. Ergo, we decided to interpret these passages as meaning “chance of surviving at 0 hp”.

In practice, our system is pretty simple. Whenever a character is reduced to 0 hp, they make a percentile check using the following table:

If the check is successful, then the character is merely unconscious and can be restored with normal (or magical) healing. If it fails, the character is dead and requires magical resurrection.

These mechanics are not the untested portion of this post: After dozens of sessions of play, they’ve been repeatedly tested and we’ve been generally pleased with the results. I may even be modifying my 3E house rules for death and dying to reflect my experiences with this system.

But recently I’ve had a desire to add some additional consequence for getting blasted down to 0 hp. So taking a page of inspiration from Jeff Rients, adding a dash from Chaos Wars (also by way of Jeff), stirring in some eldritch madness from the Vaults of Nagoh, and throwing in any other crazy ideas that I happened to have laying around my cobweb-filled mind, I came up with the table below.

Roll on the table whenever a character is reduced to 0 hit points but survives (either due to their percentile check or a raise dead spell).

Note that if you want to skip the more existential/supernatural elements of this table, you can just roll 1d20 instead of 1d30.

I was recently reminded of the clusterfuck release of the D&D Essentials line. (Designed to reduce the cost of entry to the game while reducing confusion over what books you need to buy in order to play, it has increased both cost and confusion.)

If a genie put me in charge of Wizards of the Coast, this is what I would have released instead:

Three boxed sets, each containing:

• A rulebook with all the rules necessary for a complete tier of play.
• An adventure book with a complete adventure path designed to take you through the entire tier. (Preferably using node-based or hexcrawl-inspired design. This would probably necessitate abandoning or modifying the delve format to make this work with a reasonable page count.)
• A set of dice and a solo adventure pamphlet in the Heroic Tier box.
• Whatever other goodies (character sheets, tokens, power cards, miniatures, handouts) I can get away with and still hit a price point somewhere in the $30-50 range.

I would release these boxes on a 6 month schedule. 18-24 months after the core set went on sale, I would release a new “Heroic Adventure Pack” which would contain everything in the core set but with a different adventure path. 6 months after that, a new paragon tier expansion would be released (with a new adventure path but the same rulebook).

Depending on sales performance, I might phase the old versions of the products out. But the goal would be to have:

1. A single, consistent box that says “DUNGEONS & DRAGONS” on the front cover.
2. All other products are clearly labeled “EXPANSION PACK”, making it clear which product you need to buy to start playing. (The one-and-only product that doesn’t say “Expansion” on it.)
3. To have “all the rules” you just need to pick up any combination of HEROIC-PARAGON-EPIC.

The idea is to time your product release schedule to encourage people to play through a complete 1-30 campaign and then restart a new 1-30 campaign when the next sets starts cycling through.

And, yes, the scheme is specifically designed so that people end up with multiple copies of the exact same rulebooks. I would make it a point to not even change the cover art on them. I want you to think of them as duplicates, because that increases the likelihood that you’ll loan them to your friends or even give them away.

This sequence of box sets is the core of your game line. Everything else supports them as advanced options. For example, the Heroes of the Blank Blank line could offer new character class options (possibly tied back into the current sequence of boxed sets).

Dungeon’s DDI would be used to offer an alternative track of play: Each month should contain an adventure path scenario, a heroic tier scenario, a paragon tier scenario, and an epic tier scenario. Over the course of any 18 month stretch, you’d be offering 2-3 full tracks of 1-30 play (boxed sets, Dungeon adventure path, and plug-and-play Dungeon content).

In response to the Update from the Crypt of Luan Phien, Poe asked me:

Out of curiosity, do you rely solely on the players expertise when developing maps or do you use some form of skill checks to indicate a character expertise in determining what is going on with an unusual map situation like this one?

In the case of that particular map, it was primarily player expertise that crunched out the workings of the crypt. But Poe’s question got me thinking about the wider question of how GMs make rulings while running a roleplaying game.

First, I prefer to use systems which offer broad mechanical support for GM rulings. Some people prefer pure GM fiat, but I like having a mechanical base to make rulings from because:

1. It allows me to make a ruling of uncertainty. (Instead of saying “that definitely happens” or “that definitely doesn’t happen”, I can say “that sounds likely, let’s see if it happens”.)
2. It allows for varying character capacity to have a meaningful impact on events.
3. It can provide guidance when I’m not certain how to rule.
4. The mechanical outcome is an improv opportunity, often spurring me to create things which I would not have created otherwise.
5. It provides a consistency to similar rulings over time.

And so forth. In general, badly designed rules act as unreasonable straitjackets. Good rules, on the other hand, enable new forms of play and expand the scope of the game.

With all that being said, my general approach to making rulings as a GM basically looks like this:

1. Passive observation of the world is automatically triggered.
2. Player expertise activates character expertise.
3. Player expertise can trump character expertise.

PASSIVE OBSERVATION IS AUTOMATICALLY TRIGGERED

Passive observation may include stuff that’s obvious to everybody (like walking into a room with a giant ball of flame hovering in the middle of it), but it might also include reactive mechanics for determining whether or not characters notice something that isn’t automatically apparent. In OD&D this would include surprise tests. In 3rd Edition, this would include Listen, Spot, and Knowledge checks (although these skills can also be used in non-reactive ways.)

(Why am I including Knowledge skills here? Imagine that the characters walk into a room with a large heraldic shield painted on the wall. Do the characters recognize that as the archaic heraldry of King Negut III of Yrkathia? If they do, the players shouldn’t have to ask if they recognize it — they just recognize it.)

But now we get to the real heart of the matter. This is where a player says, “I want to do X.” And you need to make a ruling about how to resolve the outcome of X.

PLAYER EXPERTISE ACTIVATES CHARACTER EXPERTISE

What I mean by this is that the characters don’t play themselves. With the exception of purely passive observation of the game world, players have to call for an action which requires a skill check in order for the skill to be activated.

If we consider a simple example, like:

Player: I check the chest for traps.

GM: Make a Search check.

This may seem self-evident to most of us. On the other hand, I have seen games where GMs will respond to “I open the chest” by calling for the Search check. You may have also heard players say things like, “My character is a 12th level rogue. She would have known better than to open a chest without checking it for traps first!”

I can see the potential legitimacy of the philosophical question being raised. Regardless of which approach we take, there is a point at which the player’s control of the character seems to stop. Consider that simple Search check again: The player decides to check the chest for traps, but then we’re allowing the mechanics to determine how, based on the character’s expertise, that search happens. But could we not, with equal validity, say that when the player decides to open the chest, we should allow the mechanics to determine how, based on the character’s expertise, that happens?

In general, however, I would point out that an integral part of roleplaying is, in fact, playing your role — i.e., making choices as if you were your character. When you turn meaningful choices over to the game mechanics instead of making them yourself, I would argue that you are no longer roleplaying.

Of course, on the other end of the spectrum you have a variety of pixel-bitching. Here you’re never allowed to turn the resolution of an action over to your character and searching the chest becomes a litany of detail:

Player: I check the chest for traps.
GM: How do you do that?
Player: I check under the chest for a pressure plate.
GM: How do you do that?
Player: I run my fingers around the perimeter, looking for any edges. Then I’ll pour some water around to see if it sinks into any sort of depression. Then I’ll very carefully lift one corner of the chest just high enough that I can slide a piece of parchment under there and see if it strikes any sort of spring-loaded trigger that’s rising with the chest.

(Or, if you’re playing with GM bastardy: “I check under the chest for a pressure plate.” “You lift the chest to look, triggering the pressure plate!”)

There is certainly some art in figuring out where the “sweet spot” is for activating the character’s expertise. But 99 times out of 100 it’s going to be fairly self-evident. When in doubt, look for the meaningful choice. Or, rather, never assume that a character is doing anything which requires a meaningful choice unless the player makes that choice.

PLAYER EXPERTISE CAN TRUMP CHARACTER EXPERTISE

On the other hand, you also don’t want to negate meaningful choices by insisting that certain actions must be handed off to the character’s expertise. That’s why I say that player expertise can trump character expertise.

Sticking with our chest-searching motif, consider a scenario in which there is a hidden compartment in a chest which can be accessed by lifting out the bottom of the chest. We’ve determined that the hidden compartment requires a DC 17 Search check to discover. The player says:

• “I search the chest.”
• “I check the bottom of the chest for hidden compartments.”
• “I take my axe and smash open the bottom of the chest.”
• “I check the chest for traps before opening it.”
• “I check the lid of the chest for hidden compartments”.

The first example is vanilla. You’ve handed the resolution over to the mechanic and you get a flat Search check against the DC of the hidden compartment. A success could generate a number of different responses (ranging from “yup, there’s a hidden compartment” to “you notice that the exterior of the chest is several inches deeper than the interior of the chest”).

The second example is more specific (and happens to coincide with what’s actually there to be found). I would tend to grant something like a +2 circumstance bonus to the Search. If there were other things to be found in the chest, I might also allow the Search check to find them (but since you’re specifically looking for something else, such a check would have a penalty applied to it).

In the third example you’ve taken an action which would automatically find the compartment. No Search check is required. (Player skill has completely trumped the mechanic.)

The fourth and fifth examples demonstrate that trumping character skill isn’t always a good thing. In the fourth example, you have no chance of finding things hidden inside the chest if you’re limiting your search to the exterior. Similarly, in the fifth example you’re specifically looking in the wrong place.

As another example, consider a hallway with a pit trap in it. The pit trap has a 50% chance of activating whenever someone steps on it and it requires a DC 17 Search check to find it. The player says:

• “I search the hall for traps.”
• “I proceed carefully down the hall, tapping ahead of me with my 10-foot pole.”
• “I summon a celestial badger and have it walk down the hall in front of me.”
• “I pour a waterskin onto the floor to see if it runs down any seams or gaps.”

The first example is, once again, a straight forward Search check. The second and third examples bypass the Search mechanics, and instead grant a 50% chance that the pole or summoned creature will trigger the trap.

The fourth example, on the other hand, could be handled in several ways. One could easily rule that such a technique would automatically find the trap (particularly if the player specifies exactly which section of corridor they’re checking). I’d probably grant a hefty bonus (say, +10) to the Search check for using an appropriate technique.

In many ways, this comes back to meaningful choice: We assumed before that characters don’t take actions which require meaningful choice unless the player makes that choice. Here we assume that any choice the player makes is probably meaningful and take the specificity of those choices into account when we make our ruling.

THE CRYPT OF LUAN PHIEN – AN EXAMPLE FROM REAL PLAY

Let’s consider the specific example of mapping the Crypt of Luan Phien, a segmented dungeon in which each section periodically rotates independently in order to change the layout of the dungeon.

At the high end, we can imagine a player saying, “I make a Knowledge (dungeoneering) check to make a map of the dungeon.” To which my answer would be, “No.” (They’ve failed to achieve the necessary specificity to activate their character’s expertise.)

In actual play, the mapping of the dungeon was solved almost entirely through player expertise. They simply observed which rooms connected to each other and slowly built up an understanding of the possible configurations of the dungeon. (The sole exception would be late in the process, when they started checking corridors to find the wall seams which would confirm their understanding of where the breaks between segments lay.)

But I can think of several ways that they could have activated their character’s skills:

• Check the curvature of the stone walls that periodically blocked various hallways in order to determine (at least roughly) the circular diameter of each section.
• Try to determine the direction in which each section was rotating.
• Try to figure out how much stone would slide past an open corridor between sections in order to determine how far each section was rotating.
• Use a compass or spell to determine orientation before and after a shift.

And so forth.

Go to Part 2

THE ART OF RULINGS
Part 2: Intention and Method
Part 3: The Fiction-Mechanics Cycle
Part 4: Default to Yes
Part 5: Skill and Difficulty
Part 6: Fictional Cleromancy
Part 7: Vectors
Part 8: Let It Ride
Part 9: Narrating Outcomes
Part 10: Fortune Positioning
Part 11: Narrative vs. Action Resolution
Part 12: Hidden vs. Open Difficulty Numbers
Part 13: Hidden vs. Open Stakes
Part 14: Group Actions

Addendum: Let It Ride on the Death Star

Rulings in Practice: Gathering Information
Rulings in Practice: Perception-Type Tests
Rulings in Practice: Social Skills
Rulings in Practice: Sanity Checks
Rulings in Practice: Traps

FURTHER READING
The Art of Pacing
The Art of the Key
Gamemastery 101

One interesting side effect of using an encumbrance system simple enough that it actually gets used is that it tends to highlight places where the underlying mechanics don’t actually work right.

These problems, generally speaking, can be mostly seen in the largest creatures. For example, rocs are supposed to serve as mounts for storm giants. But rocs can only carry up to 7,456 pounds while flying and storm giants weigh 12,000 pounds according to the Monster Manual. (And that’s assuming that the storm giant is naked.)

I often have a strong desire, once I start tinkering with a sub-system like this, to tweak things in an effort to find solutions for these sorts of problem. But this can be something of a primrose path: Fixing the underlying problem here requires changing the design of the roc, the storm giant, or both. It’s not something that can be solved at a systemic level, and while the abstraction of the encumbrance by stone system fixes some of these problems; it also introduces others.

One tweak you might want to look at, though, is allowing flying creatures to carry up to a medium load when using the encumbrance by stone system in order to give them a larger margin of error when dealing with the abstraction of the system. (On the other hand, this really only seems to be a problem with Huge or larger mounts carrying Large or larger riders due to the cubic weight gain of larger creatures. Since this is a situation which rarely applies to PCs or their mounts, it can probably be safely sweeped under the rug labeled “I Don’t Really Care” ninety-nine times out of a hundred.)

Now, if you’re really tired of reading about encumbrance rules at this point… you’re in luck! I’m all done. My next post will have absolutely nothing to do with encumbrance.

But first:

Luke Encumbered

That backpack looks pretty full, so call it 3 stones. And Yoda can probably be classed as a halfling at 2 stones. Call it 5 stones and Luke is moving at 9″.

It’s so easy!

A couple days ago I described the first foray of my PCs into the Crypt of Luan Phien, a segmented dungeon which periodically rotates and rearranges its internal layout. As part of that post, I included the maps they drew.

Since then, there have been three return expeditions to the cairn hill, each allowing them to further perfect their understanding of the complex. Because of the unusual nature of the dungeon, I thought people might be interested to see how their maps have evolved:

This is the refinement of their first expeditionary map. Basically charting out their path through the dungeon, while also trying to figure out where the breakpoints in the rotation scheme lay. Analyzing this map allowed the mapper to produce this:

This map, representing the first effort to spatially understand how the segments linked together, went through several revisions, but quickly proved accurate enough to allow them to begin moving through the complex with purpose and intent (instead of hope and abandon).

After their last expedition, the mapper felt she had achieved a deep enough understanding of how the complex was working to further refine the map, resulting in this work-in-progress:

You can see larger versions of each map by clicking on them.

For reference purposes, the letters correspond to the original map as follows: A = 1, B = 2, C = 8, D = trap north of 13, E = 7, F = 12, G = unkeyed area next to 14, H = 13, I = area south of 13, J = 6, K = 10, L = 9, M = 11, N = 4, O = 14, Q = 3, R = 5.

If you’re curious about my peculiar variances in the dungeon, you can also check out my current key for the dungeon in PDF format:

Hex P8 – Crypt of Luan Phien