Gary Gygax died today. Gygax, along with Dave Arneson, have had a tremendous impact on my life and on the lives of millions of others. Not only did they single-handedly create an entirely new form of entertainment, but D&D-inspired games were responsible for the dawn of the computer gaming industry, as well.
Rest in peace, Gary. The world is a poorer place without you.
DM: With a leering grin, the orc turns towards Eldath the Arcane!
Peter: Shit! That axe will kill me quicker than spit!
Bob: I grab him!
Peter: NO!
Bob: What’s wrong? You want to stop the orc, right?
DM: Okay, what page were the grappling rules on, again?
What do you call a rule that people don’t use because it’s too much hassle to use it?
Useless.
Which is the fate of the grappling rules in many, many gaming tables. Action movies are full of heroes and villains grabbing each other, throwing each other around, and generally wrestling of all kinds. When we see Indiana Jones grab a Nazi and throw him off a zeppelin we cheer. But if Bob’s character tries to leap on the back of the dragon and hurl the dragonrider to the ground, we cringe at the thought of looking up all those rules.
What’s the problem here? Why are so many people leery of the grappling rules?
The rules for actually initiating a grapple are relatively simply (being largely similar to the rules for bull rushing, disarming, and the like). The problem is that, once you’re in a grapple, there’s a whole slew of new rules to determine what you can and cannot do in the grapple.
If you look at any one of these rules, you can easily see the logic of why the rule works that way. But the system, as a whole, doesn’t follow any kind of consistent pattern: You can’t just take what you know about Action A in normal combat, apply the “when in grappling” rule, and know what happens when you attempt Action A while grappling.
Sometimes you can’t attempt the action. Sometimes you have to make an opposed grapple check in addition to the normal check. Sometimes you make an opposed grapple check instead of the normal check. Sometimes the scope of the action is limited (attack, but only with a light weapon; cast a spell, but only if the action is no more than 1 standard action). Sometimes the rules aren’t changed at all.
And then, on top of all that, there’s pinning… which introduces a completely different set of conditional rules. These aren’t as complicated as the rules in a non-pinned grapple, but they’re kind of a cherry on top of it all.
The net result of all this is to, effectively, double the complexity of the combat system. It’s essentially a completely new combat system which is just similar enough to the combat system you already know to add a little extra confusion to the mix.
This set of optional rules tries to fix that problem by applying a simple, consistent rule to actions attempted in grappling. You’ll find that, despite the streamlining to make them easy-to-use, they play very similarly to the existing rules for grappling.
GRAPPLING
GRAB: A character can attempt to grab another character by making a successful melee touch attack. This provokes an attack of opportunity from the target. If the attack of opportunity deals damage, the grappling attempt fails.
STARTING A GRAPPLE: Once they have grabbed an opponent, a character can immediately attempt to start a grapple by taking a free action and making an opposed grapple check. If the character fails, their grab is broken and the attempt fails. If the character succeeds, they move into their opponent’s space and begin grappling.
IN A GRAPPLE:
Characters in a grapple do not threaten opponents they are not grappling.
Characters in a grapple lose their Dexterity bonus to AC (if any) against opponents they are not grappling.
When attempting any action, a character in a grapple must first succeed at an opposed grapple check against everyone else in the grapple. This check is a free action. Opposing characters can choose to automatically fail their checks. (Note: When making a full attack you must make an opposed grapple check before each attack.)
ESCAPING A GRAPPLE: Escaping a grapple requires an attack action. As with any action in a grapple, the character must succeed at an opposed grapple check against everyone in the grapple.
MULTIPLE GRAPPLERS: Up to five combatants of the same size can grapple each other at the same time. Creatures smaller than the largest creature involved in the grapple count for half.
PINNING
A character in a grapple can attempt to pin their opponent for 1 round by making an opposed grapple check as an attack action. If the check is successful, the opponent cannot take any action except trying to escape the pin (by making an opposed grapple check as an attack action).
A character performing a pin can take additional actions normally (although they are considered to be in a grapple and must succeed at an opposed grapple check).
The character performing a pin can release it as a free action.
GRABBING WITHOUT HOLDING
When initiating a grapple, a character can attempt to grab an opponent without holding them. They (but not the opponent they are grabbing) are considered to be grappled: They do not threaten other opponents, gain no Dexterity bonus to AC against opponents they are not grabbing, and can’t move normally.
Each round, the character performing the grab must either release the grab (as a free action), use an attack action and make an opposed grapple check to maintain the grab, or use an attack action and an opposed grapple check to initiate a grapple.
Characters being grabbed can attempt to break the grab by making an opposed grapple check as an attack action. If the character being grabbed moves, they must carry the character grabbing them.
Hit points have been around for more than 30 years now. (Longer if you count their antecedents in wargaming.) So you might think that, by now, people would have a pretty firm grasp on how these mechanics worked, what they represented, and what it means to lose hit points.
You might think that. But you would be horribly mistaken.
Basically I’m writing this little mini-essay because I’m tired of engaging in the same painful debate every two months. I want to be able to simply point people to this essay and say, “Look, this is the way it works.” (This won’t actually have much effect with people who prefer to be mired in fallacies and foolishness, but it will at least delay the day on which I will inevitably succumb to a lethal case of carpal tunnel syndrome.)
So, first I’m going to repudiate the two primary fallacies which lead the innocent astray when it comes to understanding hit points. And then I’m going to pull my Big Reveal an explain the beautiful abstraction which lies at the heart of the hit point system.
(It should be noted that this essay specifically deals with the type of inflationary hit point system found in D&D. The term “hit points” may also be used for very different damage tracking systems, to which this essay probably won’t apply at all.)
FALLACY THE FIRST: THE AXE TO THE FACE
The first fallacy goes like this:
1. Dupre has 100 hp.
2. A goblin with an axe has hit him 10 times and done 78 points of damage.
3. Clearly, the goblin has hit Dupre in the face 10 times and Dupre is still alive! That’s ridiculous!
The fallacy lies in the illogical leap from point 2 to point 3. A moment’s consideration clearly reveals that there is absolutely no reason to assume that, every single time the goblin landed a solid blow, it meant that the goblin planted his axe straight between Dupre’s eyes.
For example, imagine that you’re talking to someone in real life and they said, “Did you know that Bill was actually shot three times during a mugging a few years back?” Given that Bill is still alive, would you immediately assume that, during the mugging, Bill was dropped to his knees, a gun held to his head execution-style, and the trigger pulled three times?
Of course not. You would assume that Bill was probably hit in the legs or the arms. If he was hit in the chest, you’d assume that he only survived because he got prompt medical attention. And if one of the bullets actually did take him in the head, you’d know that it was a medical miracle that he was still alive.
Similarly, there’s no reason to assume that Dupre was hit in the face ten times with an axe. In fact, quite the opposite is true: There is every reason to assume that he wasn’t hit in the face ten times with an axe.
FALLACY THE SECOND: DEATH BY DODGING
The second fallacy is most often committed because, after escaping the trap of the first fallacy, people go to the other extreme:
1. Dupre could not have been hit 10 times in the face with axe and survived.
2. Therefore, Dupre was never hit with the axe.
3. Dupre won’t be hit by the axe until a blow causes his hit points to drop below 0. When that happens, the goblin will have finally hit him with the axe.
The fallacy here lies in the leap from point 1 to point 2.
Let’s go back to the example of Bill’s mugging. If you friend said to you, “Did you know that Bill was actually shot three times during a mugging a few years back?” Would you assume that he meant, “The guy mugging bill shot his gun three times, but never actually hit Bill.”?
Of course not.
In terms of D&D, the nature of this fallacy is more explicitly revealed when you look at something like poison. If the orc’s axe is coated with poison and we embrace this fallacy, then Dupre has been exposed to the poison 10 times despite the fact he’s never actually been hit by the axe.
And you can reproach this fallacy from multiple directions: If the hit point loss from blows that don’t “really” hit is because Dupre is wearing himself out from dodging, why is dodging a +1 flaming sword more exhausting then dodging a +1 sword?
And, of course, you also have the oddity that, apparently, dodging a blow from a sword can be even more deadly to you than being hit by the sword.
THE BEAUTIFUL ABSTRACTION
The trick to understanding the hit point system is understand that a hit point is not equal to a hit point. In D&D, 1 hit point of damage always represents a physical wound. However, the severity of the wound represented varies depending on how many hit points the victim has.
For a character with 1 hp, that 1 hp of damage represents a serious wound — a punctured lung, a broken leg, or something of that ilk.
For a character with 10 hp, that 1 hp of damage represents a meaningful wound — a deep but or a broken rib.
For a character with 100 hp, that 1 hp of damage represents an essentially inconsequential wound — a scratch, a bruise, or the like.
The reason any particular character has fewer of more hit points (and, thus, varying the severity of any given wound they receive) is abstracted. For some characters its skill; others luck; others physical toughness; others divine grace; others magical protection; and so forth. For most PCs, it’s some combination of all these things.
This is a beautiful abstraction because it allows for quick, simple, and entertaining gameplay. One could certainly design a system with variances in skill, luck, toughness, divine favor, magical protection, and the like were all separately modeled. Many such systems exist. But none of them are as simple, easy, or fun or as hit points have proven to be.
IS IT PERFECT?
No. The system is an abstraction, and that brings with it both advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are simplicity and completeness. The disadvantage is that you can’t reliably pull concrete information back out of the abstraction — and, if you try, you’ll eventually find corner cases where seeming absurdities crop up.
For example, it’s theoretically possible for a sufficiently weak character to deal no more than 1 hp of damage per attack. Such a character could, theoretically, land 100 blows on a character with 100 hp before taking him down. Add poison to the scenario, and you’ve now locked yourself down to a scenario where the weak character is, apparently, whittling his opponent to death.
Such corner cases are statistical oddities, but they’re going to reliably crop up in any system which doesn’t require several additional orders of complexity.
Which leaves the only significant and intractable problem with the hit point abstraction: The cure spells. Despite the fact that the number of hit points required to represent a wound with a particular severity varies depending on the character’s total hit points, a cure spell heals a flat number of hit points. Thus, a cure light wounds spell used on a 1st level fighter will heal grievous wounds. When the same spell is used on a 10th level fighter, on the other hand, it can’t handle more than a scratch.
This is a legacy issue which has been retained for reasons of game balance. But if you want to fix this, simply have cure spells work more like natural healing: Multiply the number of hit points cured by the creature’s HD.
Hit points aren’t a one-size-fits-all solution to tracking wounds in roleplaying games. There are lots of reasons why you might want a more concrete representation of actual wounds or a realistic modeling of incapacitation.
But hit points are often attacked for the most erroneous of reasons. And, as I said up front, I don’t necessarily expect this little essay to make any sort of huge dent in that tidal wave of ignorance and faulty logic. But it might help me keep my blood pressure down.
As you may have already heard, the D20 Trademark License is being revoked with the release of 4th Edition. WotC considers the D20 mark to have been a failure due to the lack of quality control: In their opinion, the value of the brand had been diluted because consumers associated it with a lot of bad products.
That may or may not be true, but the utility of the D20 Trademark License was never about identifying quality products: It was about identifying compatible products.
This leaves third-party publishers (like myself) in something of a bind: Without the D20 Trademark License, we have nothing that we can use to quickly and easily identify our products as being compatible. (The D20 Trademark License not only covers the use of the trademark itself — it also covers the “Requires the Use of the yada yada yada” language which is the second-most common way of identifying a compatible product.)
This sudden yanking of the D20 Trademark License only complicates a situation which was already on the verge of being completely muddied by the advent of 4th Edition: To whit, there’s no easy way for a publisher to indicate that their new product is compatible with the new edition. (Or, if the market forks, that their product is compatible with 3rd Edition and not with 4th Edition.)
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.
3rd Edition Seal – Color
3rd Edition Seal – Black
3rd Edition Seal – White
3rd Edition Seal – Grayscale
3rd Edition Seal – Full Size
3rd Edition Seal – PSD File
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.
Recently I’ve been involved in several discussions regarding skills in D&D.
There’s an attitude I’ve never been able to understand when it comes to roleplaying games (or anything else for that matter): “I have too many options.”
For example, lots of people complain that there are “too many supplements” for their game. In fact, a lot of people are looking forward to 4th Edition precisely because it will strip away all of those supplements. Ignoring for the moment that 4th Edition will have supplements released for it several months before the game itself is actually available, these complaints and this glee simply leave me scratching my head.
If you don’t want them, don’t buy them.
It’s not like someone is coming round to your house, holding a gun to your head, and forcing you to buy a supplement. If you don’t want them, then don’t buy them. Nothing could be easier. Your “problem” can be solved by doing, literally, nothing at all.
On the other hand, if you need them or want them… well, there they are. And the more of them there are, the better it is (because that drastically increases the odds that whatever supplement you need at this particular moment in time will, in fact, exist).
I bring this up because I see the same complaint leveled at 3rd Edition’s skill system.
The sentiment is perhaps most eloquently put by Vinicus Zoio on WotC’s messageboards: “God, I hope they get rid of skill points!”
“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.
(1) If you want to quickly generate a character’s skills, select a number of class skills equal to # + Int modifier and give them skill ranks equal to 3 + your level, where # is based on your class. (Multiclass Characters: For each class, select a number of class skills equal to # + Int modifier and give them skill ranks equal to their class level. Add +3 skill ranks to the class skills selected for whatever class was taken at 3rd level.)
(2) If you want to customize your character’s skills, on the other hand, you have complete flexibility to do that.
The only thing I’d tweak is the rules for handling increases in Intelligence so that they retroactively grant you skill points (the same way that Con increases retroactively boost your hit points). You can argue the “realism” of this (I don’t have a problem with it), but it removes the only mechanical hiccup getting in the way of the fast-and-easy creation method of scenario #1.
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:
(1) Rewriting the skill rules to remove a handful of truly problematic skill uses. (Diplomacy and Tumble, I’m looking at you.) These are areas that need to be addressed any way.
(2) Not worrying about it. If the wizard can cast improved invisibility, why are you fretting about the fact that the uber-specialized Hider finds it trivial to sneak past the unskilled Spotter? If the spellcaster can whip off a dominate person, why is it a problem that the relatively naive guy who has never spent a rank in Sense Motive is consistently getting the wool pulled over his eyes by the legendary Bluff specialist?
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.
