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.)

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.

Yesterday I posted a conceptual system for generating the local market for magic items. Today, using the automatic treasure generator at Alderon’s Tower, I’m going to rapidly generate the local market for magic items in the City of Greyhawk.

THE MARKET LIST

(1) The City of Greyhawk has a population of 160,000. So using Treasure Type A I generate 160 treasure parcels and write down the resulting list of magic items. This took me about 15 minutes and resulted in a list of 137 items.

(2) While generating the list, I’m also jotting down ideas which occur to me during the process. For example, I notice that I’m generating an unusual number of cursed scimitars accompanied by a single magical scimitar. I’m struck with the idea of a con artist using the scimitar +2 to demonstrate how amazing his magical scimitar is, and then swapping it out for one of the cursed scimitars when the sale is actually completed. I also notice several water-themed items, including an Apparatus of Kwalish. Has someone discovered a sunken wreck in the Nyr Dyv?

MODIFYING THE MARKET

Greyhawk is a haven for adventuring-types and a hive of magic-users, so I’m going to posit that the market for magic items is fairly active and update it every session.

(1) I roll 16 new treasure parcels and add them to the market list:

oil of etherealness
wand of metal and mineral detection
libram of gainful conjuration
spear +2
bag of holding (500 lbs.)

(2) I roll 2d10 for (9 – 8 =) 1 + the 5 items I generated for a total of 6 items. I randomly eliminate 6 items from the market list:

potion of rainbow hues
cloak of protection +3
oil of air elemental invulnerability
pole arm +1
cloak of the bat
potion of blue dragon control

(3) Once again I try to keep the creative side of my brain churning: If a libram of gainful conjuration has been put up for sale, could it be from the collection of a local wizard? Is he dead and his estate being auctioned in pieces? Has she fallen on hard times and is trying to generate some fast coin?

And is there a reason somebody suddenly has a pressing need to control a blue dragon? Or is there perhaps a draconic cult trying to remove anti-dragon items from circulation? (If the PCs have such an item, might they be targeted?)

The players in my OD&D open table periodically ask me, “Are there any magic items for sale?” Not certain of how I want to handle that, up to now I’ve been fairly content to simply say, “Not yet.”

It’s a question I’ve also struggled with in my Ptolus campaign: On the one hand, positing a setting where wandering mercenaries go delving into dungeons in order to pull out vast hordes of wealth which frequently include magical treasures, allowing the PCs to sell those treasures, and then concluding that there’s no way to buy magic items seems unreasonable. (Although running a campaign where the PCs really are the sole sellers of magic items in the whole world seems like it could be potentially fascinating, albeit completely different from a typical D&D campaign.) On the other hand, I think it can be quite evocative to see what the “competition” has been bringing in.

As far as Ptolus goes, I’ve largely been handling it in an ad hoc fashion. And I feel like it’s been a mild success in evoking the wider sense of a setting in which delvers are plumbing the depths of the vast catacombs beneath the city. But I’ve also longed for a better/systematic way of handling it, and now my OD&D campaign has raised the demand to a figuratively fever pitch.

The method described below hasn’t been heavily tested yet, and it does require a fair bit of prep for larger communities. (Although there are some methods for breaking that prep up into manageable chunks if you find yourself needing to generate it on the fly.)

THE LOCAL MARKET

The local market can vary quite a bit. While it could be a generic “magic mart” there are lots of other options: In small communities, it might be nothing more than Bob who has a couple of magical items stuffed in a trunk that once belonged to his adventuring grandfather. Local churches might have a supply of divine items. It might be an eclectic collection of antiquities dealers, pawnshops, down-on-their-luck magicians, and the like. It might be a secretive cult of black-robed alley-dwellers. The local mage’s academy might buy up all the items that come into town and then re-sell them (along with new creations) at a mark-up.  There might be specialty fences trying to evade the local prohibitions on the dissemination of dangerous magical weaponry.

THE LOCAL SUPPLY: You can determine the initial supply of items in a community by randomly determining magical treasure once per 1,000 inhabitants. (So in a community of 40,000, you would make forty checks.) If appropriate, you can vary this according to the treasure type of the predominant population. Or you can just go with a flat 50% chance.

In OD&D, for example, a typical human settlement of 30,000 people would use Treasure Type A (40% chance of any 3 magic items) and you’d made the check 30 times.

For AD&D1, you might want to use Table II.B on pg. 120 of the DMG in combination with the random check.

For D&D3, you’ll need to figure out what level to roll using the tables on pg. 52-53 of the 3.5 DMG. (You might try randomizing that by rolling 1d20.)

(Note: You’re not generating a list of every single magic item in town. You’re just generating the stuff that’s currently available for sale.)

THE MARKET LIST: When you’re done, you’ll have a list of items currently available for sale in town. Where the PCs will need to go (or what they’ll need to do) in order to procure a particular item on the list is up to your discretion.

MODIFYING THE MARKET LIST: Obviously, anything the PCs buy should be removed from the market list and anything they sell should be added to the list.

Adding Items: At set intervals (either once per session or once per some set amount of time in the game world), roll on your treasure tables again once per 10,000 inhabitants. (So if you rolled 40 checks originally, the market fluctuates using 4 checks on a periodic basis.) Items generated in this fashion are added to the local market — either due to new finds from local adventuring parties or new creations from local wizards.

Removing Items: Count the number of items you just added to the market. Modify that number by (1d10 – 1d10) and then randomly remove that number of items from the market.

(For example, if you generate 8 new magic items and then roll (9 – 3 =) 6, you would remove (8 + 6 =) 14 items from the market. If you had rolled (2 – 6 =) -4, then you would have removed (8 – 4 =) 4 items from the market.)

NOTES

In practice, generating the initial list of items may be a bit time-consuming for larger communities. But keeping the list updated after that point shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.

If you find yourself needing to use this system on the fly, you can de-centralize the local market for magic items and reduce the load by generating only the supply available at each potential “outlet”. If the PCs don’t find what they want from Aldric One-Eye, of course, they might go check with the local fences from the Thieves’ Guild… but that should give you time to generate the short list of what the Thieves’ Guild has on hand. (Simply jot down which items can be found where on your market list for future reference as necessary.)

Of course, the entire process can also be considerably sped up by using one of the numerous automatic generators that can be found scattered around online.

Go to Part 2

The description of the original helm of teleportation from OD&D recently struck me as particularly interesting:

Helm of Teleportation: The Magic-User employing this helm must have a Teleportation spell in order to take advantage of the device. Having but one such spell the Magic-User can Teleport himself endlessly about the universe, but if he teleports some other person or object the helm does not function and the spell proper is used. Thus the helm is good only to transport the Magic-User himself. Treat as a non-protective helm if worn into combat.

(A passage which also indicates that “protective helms” should have some beneficial effect in combat, but if there’s any explanation for what the benefit would be the rules are rather silent on the matter. I’ve been thinking about applying a -1 AC penalty for missing helmets. But I digress.)

What I was particularly struck by in this passage was the similarity between its mechanical construction and the construction of reserve feats from Complete Mage for 3rd Edition. Conceptually I always liked the idea of reserve feats (allowing spellcasters to make minor magic-based contributions on a regular basis), but found the actual execution to be rather broken. (Allowing wizards to do 6d6 points of area effect damage per round with no saving throw, for example, no longer qualifies as a minor contribution.)

But it might be interesting to take properly balanced reserve-type abilities and have them accessible via magical equipment (like the original helm of teleportation). I’m particularly drawn to the image of magic wands that don’t have charges, but instead allow you to use specific spells you currently have memorized in a powered-down form.

On the other hand, maybe chewing up an equipment slot would be necessary to keep this sort of thing balanced. Or what if there was a percentage chance that you’d lose your reserve spell whenever you triggered the reserve item? In a semi-similar fashion, AD&D’s helm of teleportation limited the number of uses per day based on the number of teleport spells you had prepared. (So that the item extends your magical endurance, but not necessarily limitlessly so.)