While poking around caving websites doing research for the Better Dungeon Maps series, I stumbled across a thread at CaveChat.org of “caving lies”, many of which seemed to have a great deal of pertinence to fantasy dungeoncrawling:

• “You pretty much can’t get lost.”
• “The trip can’t take more than 4 hours.”
• “I’m just going to poke my head in and see where it goes.”
• “It’s dry.”
• “We’ve got plenty of rope.”
• “You can fit through there. No problem.”
• “Trust me.”
• “Leave your pack behind, you won’t be needing it.”
• “I know exactly where I’m at!”
• “The cave map is accurate.”
• “I don’t know how those rocks got in your pack.”
• “I only scooped a hundred feet.”

Tangentially, the idea of “scooping” an area (i.e., being the first to explore it) has recently come up quite a bit in my hexcrawl campaign. Should have more on that later this week or next.

A couple days ago I followed a trackback from here to a Danish gaming blog called “The Voice from the River Valley”. Curious, I used Google Translate to take a peek around. The blog line, which in Danish reads:

En blog om rollespil af Morten Greis. Fra Tryggevælde ådal en dyb klang. Elverpigernes dans. Røre i det hvide slør. Disen hyller landskabet. De gamle stammer krogede trolde.

Is currently rendered by Google Translate as:

A blog about RPG by Morten Greis. From Tryggevælde creek in a deep tone. Elfin girls dancing. Stir in the white veil. Haze clothed the landscape. The ancient tribes hull trolls.

I don’t know anything about Danish, but I’m guessing something has gone slightly awry with that last sentence. The poetic imagery got me thinking about it, though… what if the ancient tribes actually were hulling trolls?

Trolls are regenerative, right? So imagine that a tribe of (let’s say) Vikings learned how to use certain alchemical compounds and rites to warp the bones and flesh of captured troll-spawn, twisting and stretching them until they formed the endurant, regenerating hulls of their longboats. Vulnerable to fire, of course, but so is wood.

Of course, for this technique to be worthwhile the trolls would still need to be alive. And the pain must be unimaginable.

Beware the Raiders of the Screaming Ships.

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 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!