In the comments on yesterday’s post, I linked to my house rules for death and dying and my thoughts on save-or-die effects. One of the major thoughts in those posts was the fact that I’ve replaced death effects with Constitution damage in my campaign, and my hypothesis that non-deadly save-or-die effects could similarly be replaced with ability score damage. (For example, a petrification effect could inflict Dexterity damage. A flesh to stone spell would only turn you to stone if it reduced your Dexterity to 0. If your Dexterity wasn’t reduced to 0, then you can still feel your reflexes slowing down as your flesh stiffens and hardens.)

Using Constitution damage for death effects has worked really well: Death effects remain fearsome without bypassing ablative mechanics entirely, and the hefty hit point loss coupled to Constitution damage means that they have a meaningful impact even if death isn’t achieved.

Replacing other save-or-die effects with comparable ability damage, however, has run up against the fact that ability score damage can be a real headache in 3rd Edition. Dexterity damage, for example, means recalculating Armor Class, attack bonuses, and skill bonuses on-the-fly in the middle of combat. A certain degree of system mastery will allow you to simply note the penalty and then apply it to everything that you remember is based on Dexterity, but once you start tossing around multiple types of ability score damage it can turn into a real nightmare.

Recently, however, I’ve realized that the solution may have been staring me in the face. There’s another type of damage which would normally require massive recalculation of multiple scores and abilities: Energy drain. The designers of 3rd Edition, however, recognized what a pain-in-the-ass energy drain could be in previous editions and supplied a simple method for handling it in the middle of encounters: Negative levels.

Thus, in 3rd Edition, when you suffer a negative level you simply:

• -1 on all skill checks, ability checks, attack rolls, and saving throws
• -5 hit points
• -1 effective level (for level checks, etc.)
• Lose 1 spell from highest-level of currently available spells.

Can a similar solution work for ability score damage? I think so.

SUPER SIMPLE ABILITY SCORE DAMAGE

For every two points of ability damage you suffer during an encounter (regardless of which ability), you suffer a -1 penalty on all skill checks, ability checks, attack rolls, and saving throws.

Constitution Loss: Constitution damage also subtracts -1 hit point per HD for every 2 points of Constitution damage suffered.

Spellcasting: Spellcasters who have their spellcasting attribute targeted must adjust the save DCs of their spells due to damage suffered.

When the encounter ends, re-calculate the actual penalties of any damage which remains.

(The rules for healing drain/damage remain the same. Similarly, the rules for what happens when an ability score is reduced to 0 remain the same.)

Yesterday’s post about hovering at death’s door got me thinking about AD&D’s system shock rules. In the 1st Edition Player’s Handbook, these rules read:

System Shock Survival states the percentage chance the character has of surviving the following forms of magical attacks (or simple application of the magic): aging, petrification (including flesh to stone spell!), polymorph any object, polymorph others. Example: The wicked necromancer polymorphs (others) his hireling into a giant roc, with the rather foolish agreement of the changee; the hireling must make a saving throw based on his constitution score using the table above. Assuming he survives, a further saving throw would have to be made if he was again polymorphed or dispelled back to original form. The saving throw must be equal to or less than the percentage shown.

Resurrection survival shows the percentage chance the character has of being successfully raised from the dead or resurrected by a cleric. The score of the percentile dice must be equal to or less than the number shown on the table, or the character fails to be revivified and is completely and totally dead forever. Remember that a character can never be raised from the dead/resurrected a total number of times in excess of the character’s initial constitution score.

Reading through these rules again prompted a couple of thoughts.

First, wouldn’t re-introducing some sort of save-or-die effect for polymorph spells pretty much instantly solve the balance problems those spells have in 3rd Edition? This is a pretty good example of how the long, slow retreat from lethal consequences in D&D can have some really bad tack-on effects when those lethal consequences were serving as an important balancing mechanism.

Second, the degree to which order has been imposed onto the Gygaxian chaos of the early rulebooks. It’s easy to look at big examples (like getting all the numbers pointed in the same direction) and ignore the multitude of smaller adjustments made over the years: For example, 2nd Edition just quietly smoothed away the fact that you have one set of saving throws resolved using a d20-roll-under mechanic determined primarily by class (but adjusted by race and ability score) and a completely different set of saving throws resolved using percentile dice determined by ability score. And even retro-clones like OSRIC follow suit.

Nor, in my opinion, is this something that’s limited to published rulebooks. Gygax was an effusively creative fellow, but his rulebooks are dizzying affairs of the contradictory and the imparsable. I’ve talked before about the fact that the ur-game of D&D basically requires you to impose your will upon the rulebooks in order to play, and I think, when confronted with AD&D, we all tend to quietly gloss over the grosser oddities while sorting everything into a more comprehensible order. And I think that’s true even when we don’t really think about the fact that we’re doing it.

As a final thought, here’s the same set of rules in AD&D2:

System Shock states the percentage chance a character has to survive magical effects that reshape or age his body: petrification (and reversing petrification), polymorph, magical aging, etc. It can also be used to see if the character regains consciousness in particularly difficult situations. For example, an evil mage polymorphs his dim-witted hireling into a crow. The hireling, whose Constitution score is 13, has an 85 percent chance to survive the change. Assuming he survives, he must successfully roll for system shock again when he is changed back to his original form or else he will die.

This may be the perfect example of the shift from AD&D1 to AD&D2: Like most of the rules, this one is essentially unchanged. But in changing a roc into a crow one gets an immediate sense of how AD&D2 rulebooks were turned into vanilla.

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).

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!