I just had one of those moments when you realize that not everyone has noticed the same thing you have.

Tip for speeding up combat resolution in 3rd Edition: Once you’ve identified the AC you’re trying to hit, figure out what number you need to roll on the d20 in order to hit it. Now you don’t need to do math every time you roll: You just look at the die and instantly know whether you hit or not.

The more casual version of that is “lowest threshold”: Did you hit last time? Did you roll equal to or higher than that roll? Then you hit again. Did you roll lower? Then do the math (and, if you hit after doing the math, you’ve set a new lowest threshold).

This obviously doesn’t work if your attack bonuses or the target’s AC are shifting a lot. But 9 times out of 10, those numbers are consistent and the method works just fine.

Also: Roll your damage dice at the same time. If you hit, the damage is right there. If you didn’t, then you just ignore them.

(click for legible size)

I still can’t decide if it bugs me or not that alignment takes up something like 1/5th of the chapter on character creation (simply due to the bulk of information being conveyed). It was originally meant to be relegated to a sidebar, but it actually proved too large for that and ended up getting all of page 11 to itself.

Of course, that’s partly because the information on alignment needs to be entirely contained in Chapter 1, whereas the rest of Chapter 1 references players out to the more detailed descriptions of ability scores, classes, races, and the like found elsewhere in the rulebook.

A couple of other options I entertained:

(1) Removing alignment entirely. I would have left “good” and “evil” descriptors in for spells and extraplanar creatures, but the basic concept of PCs having an “alignment” would have been gone. Ultimately, I decided this was too radical a departure.

(2) Just describing the two axes of alignment — good vs. evil; law vs. chaos — in general terms and not discussing each combination in detail. (This might have included an old school, x-y axis chart of alignments.) A remnant of this remains in the sidebar on page 11, but what I discovered was that new players weren’t grokking the system. They were asking a lot of clarifying questions, and that’s usually an indication that the rulebook isn’t doing its job.

What do you think?

Check out this page purporting to be a list of Words That Don’t Exist in the English Language. It’s been making the rounds for awhile, so you may have seen it. And at least portions of it have possibly been debunked. But here are a couple of examples:

Waldeinsamkeit (German): The feeling of being alone in the woods.

Forelsket (Norwegian): The euphoria you experience when you are first falling in love.

Gheegle (Filipino): The urge to pinch or squeeze something that is unbearably cute.

What concepts would be so unique to a fantasy world that they might give rise to words which are, more-or-less, untranslatable to English?

Here’s a few thoughts:

The feeling of slight nausea and dizziness that happens when you teleport somewhere.

A color that can only be created by magic.

The soul-searing, howling noise created by adamantine when it’s shattered.

The sick giddiness left in the wake of a charm or domination effect.

What would be some good words for that? What other concepts would be evocative?

You may have heard that if you cut an earthworm in half, both halves will grow back into a full worm. That’s an urban legend. (They have amazing regenerative powers, but a severed back end will never be able to grow a new head.) But if you’re wondering how you could bring this into an RPG session, the answer is self-evident: Toss in a couple trolls.

More intriguing is the case of the bulldog ant:

“But the bulldog-ant of Australia affords us the most extraordinary example of its kind; for if it is cut in two, a battle begins between the head and the tail. The head seizes the tail in its teeth, and the tail defends itself bravely by stinging the head: The battle may last for half an hour, until they die or are dragged away by other ants. This contest takes place every time the experiment is tried.” (Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation)

I think the behavior after severing would be easy enough to model as a confusion effect on both halves of the creature. But the real question would be determining when and how the creature would get severed in the first place. A few thoughts:

(1) Some sort of modification on the mechanic used for severing a hydra’s head. The question, however, is how you can motivate a PC to actually make the sunder attempt. (This problem also exists with hydras.)

(2) Treat all weapons as effectively vorpal against the creature. When somebody confirms a crit off of a natural 20, the creature is effectively severed.

(3) Treat it as an effect of bloodying the creature (reducing it to half hit points).

(4) Treat it as an effect of killing the base creature (which is effectively transformed into two new creatures). Maybe there’s only a percentage chance that this happens.

(5) Set a “Break Threshold” for creature: If somebody deals more damage than the break threshold in a single attack, the creature is severed.

I recently became aware of the Sarajevo Roses: Deep scars in the concrete of Sarajevo created by the thousands of mortar rounds fired there during the intense urban warfare of the Bosnian War. Where these explosions resulted in casualties, the scars have been filled with a red resin.

I was touched by the sad, serene beauty of these enduring monuments.

But since I’m the creator of fantasy worlds, my mind was also inspired. Taking the familiar and twisting it to the fantastic is nice. Taking something culturally unfamiliar and then, on top of that, giving it an extra twist of fantasy can often result in some really memorable touchstones.

The Sarajevo Roses exist as both an artifact and a memorial of a specific, historic event. More importantly they’re an unintended side effect that, to my American eyes, testifies that something outside of my normal experience happened in this place. What sort of fantastical equivalents could we hypothesize?

Direct fantasy parallels, for example, aren’t too hard to conjure up: The long, blackened scars in the fields around a village where the blight-breath of an elder dragon prevent anything from growing. The effervescent green sands driven into the eastern walls of an adobe village by the sandstorm thrust up by the execution of the Seven Gods. And so forth.

Going a bit further afield, what examples of fantastical side-effects could we postulate from non-destructive events? Are there oil slicks in the street from the fad for armor golems among the city’s mages? Are the skies above the city filled with long twists of multi-colored thread because magic carpets have a tendency to unravel? (And once a year is there a Skein Day when the magical thread is gathered for some purpose either practical or festive?) Does the casting of a time stop spell leave little temporal schisms?