Random Advancement

In a comment on James Raggi's blog, Geoffrey wrote about a simple alternative level advancement system:

At the conclusion of each session, each player rolls 1d20 for his character. On an adjusted roll of 20, the character gains a level. The roll is modified by +1 for each previous failed leveling roll at this level only.

It's an interesting alternative, especially for treasure-poor campaigns, which is what Geoffrey runs. I might be tempted to use the 2d6 method, though, for faster advancement: if you roll doubles, you advance.

A suggestion to make advancement harder for higher levels or weaker challenges: add the highest HD creature defeated to the roll and beat your current level (or level +20, for Geoffrey's method.) You're third level, and wipe out a bunch of goblins: roll 2d6, and if you get double 3s or higher, you advance. You're 6th level? Sorry, you won't advance fighting 1HD monsters unless you roll double 6s.

The Last Minute GM

Usually, I reserve posts about mishearing or misreading words in comical fashion for my personal (non-gaming) blog. But today I saw a headline at Gnome Stew that said "Last Minute GM Gift?" I was scrolling through my RSS feed pretty fast, and I missed the last word.

Last Minute GM.

That's a concept that's just begging to be explored, but I haven't collected my thoughts yet on what last-minute GMing should be like. I've sort of explored it in the megadungeon series, if you consider improvisation an important part of last-minute GMing. But I suspect there's so much more possible.

Undead and Constructs

A thread on the Microlite20 forum got me thinking about making undead, especially zombies and skeletons, more difficult opponents, but without raising their hit dice or hit points, and without adding much complexity. The idea is that zombies, at least in zombie movies, keep coming at you and ignore wounds that would kill a living creature; they stop when decapitated or shot in the head. Fire may also destroy them. Similarly, skeletons sometimes keep attacking until smashed to bits.

My idea: for ordinary attacks, don't mark cumulative damage against hit points. Instead, roll the zombie/skeleton's hit dice; if you do more damage in a single hit than the number rolled, the zombie/skeleton drops, stunned, and you have a chance to finish it off before it gets back up. Aiming at the head does a critical injury instead of hp damage; once a head injury is higher than the zombie's hit points, the zombie is truly dead. Likewise, fire or acid work as normal against zombies, and attacks with blunt, smashing weapons work as normal against skeletons; other non-weapon attacks may be viable as well.

This can be adapted to other undead or to constructs. Ghosts might ignore non-magical physical attacks, compare non-cumulative damage on magical physical attacks to a hit dice roll for a temporary stun, and be destroyed by appropriate non-physical attacks that do cumulative damage more than their hit points, as well as by destruction of their physical remains. A lich might treat all attacks as a stun and attacks aimed at an amulet, canopic jar or periapt as critical injuries. This allows the GM to create custom monsters that can only be truly destroyed in specific ways, leaving the players to guess or research those ways.

Upcoming Posts

I have no immediate plans for any posts, so I thought I'd just take it easy and work on a couple projects, which may eventually surface here. One of the things I'm doing is following my own directions to put together a megadungeon region by region, mostly to see if I missed anything or need to explain something better. I may actually post each region as a one-page dungeon at some point.

It's all part of a general plan to go back over things I've posted and boil them down into much shorter, clearer statements. The psionics series, for example, if I were ever going to use it, needs a rewrite. There's also a few things I'd like to brainstorm at some point, like a different approach to monsters or spells.

That's all for later.

Persuasive Speaking

Yesterday I wrote: "social skills don't convince anybody to do anything; they direct people's attention towards or away from facts, predictions, or lies that will appeal to the listener." What I'm getting at is that it's the content of what a person says that persuades a person. I want to give a couple examples, starting with something absurdly basic: getting a swordsman to join your adventuring party.

The modern way to handle this is through social skills, something like Bargaining skill if you offer the swordsman pay, Intimidation if you try to coerce him, Guile or Acting if you lie to him and claim to be working for someone he knows and respects. But really, it should be what you offer, what threat you make, what lie you use that persuades. In real life, a person who knows how to bargain knows what the fair price would be for various personality types; a person who knows how to intimidate likewise knows what threats might work for which people. If you're going to use skill rolls, social skills should be used to provide clues to what offers or threats to make, instead of as a technique for taking over an NPC.

So take our swordsman. We want him to join our party and attack an ogre tribe. Does this idea frighten the swordsman? Then mentioning it is likely to get a negative reaction. Does he have a beef with the ogres, but can't find other people to help take them on? He's likely to jump at the offer. Do you offer him gold? If so, how much money would he expect? Is he greedy, demanding more than the going rate? Has he heard of you, and if so, how does he feel about you? Do you have a reputation as someone who hires people who are never seen again?

For every simple request, there are specific things you can mention that will increase the chances of an NPC agreeing, and specific things that will make an NPC reject your request. Most of the time, you won't have personality information relevant to what the PCs are asking, but that's OK; that's what you have a reaction roll for, to decide how an NPC feels. Most reaction roll mechanics are elaborations of a 50-50 roll, with adjustments for dangerous versus trivial requests. Some requests, like "kill yourself", will almost always be rejected, and others, like buying a simple item from a merchant who sells that item, are almost always accepted. For such requests, there's no need to roll. For others, make a quick roll and modify it from whatever prepared or improvised personality information you have on the NPC. Judge the content of what players say by picking out key words and the players' apparent attitude towards those concepts. Are they insulting the king? Then you have to decide what the general local feelings towards the king are, or whether the NPC's particular demographic feels differently than the masses. If you actually wrote notes on an NPC, you might already know that the NPC is a rebel, or a loyalist. And as you make reaction rolls, some results may be highly unlikely, but show up anyways; you can take these to indicate unique personality features, which you can then add to your notes, building the NPC's character on the fly.

This should pretty well cover simple requests, but what about extended persuasive conversations, like debates before a jury? I'll cover those in a future post.

Social Skills

Today's question to ponder: are socials skills a bad model for social mechanics? I'm talking in a broader sense of "skills", obviously, since in OD&D, there are no skill rolls of any kind, so there is no need for social skills. But traditionally, players think of conversations as a task (persuade the NPC.) You roll to make an NPC do what you want. This leads to big Internet showdowns over whether NPCs should be allowed to make skill rolls against PCs.

My argument: in reality, social skills don't convince anybody to do anything; they direct people's attention towards or away from facts, predictions, or lies that will appeal to the listener.

Discussion?

Fighter Attacks

Before getting into the social conflict rules for OD&D I've hinted at, I thought I'd take a break from the long posts and pose a simple question. In OD&D, fighters attacking creatures of 1 HD or less can make 1 attack per level.

What if this were changed to "fighters attacking creatures with less hit dice than their level can make multiple attacks per turn against up to (LEVEL) hit dice worth of opponents"? In other words, a 9th level fighter can attack:

• 9 creatures of 1 HD or less;
• one 5 HD and one 4 HD creature;
• three 3 HD creatures.

Does that seem too powerful?

Personality Conflicts

There's a thread on RPGNet lamenting how physical combat takes much longer than debate. The focus seems to be more on shortening combat rather than lengthening debate, but it does tie into some more things I wanted to say about reaction rolls and non-violent interaction between PCs and NPCs.

In the midst of the thread, people have brought up the example of players who aren't persuasive in real life being forced to persuade NPCs in character, then being penalized for their lack of persuasiveness, even if their characters have high charisma or should otherwise be more persuasive than the player behind the mask. There's a lot going on in the thread discussion, which I'm going to ignore. The real issue is "do you judge actions, including persuasion, on what the characters do, or how the players think it should be done?"

Ignore social actions for a moment and think about simple character actions. If a player says "I stick my head through the door," but the door is closed, do you say "you ram your head repeatedly against the closed door until your skull is cracked. Roll 3d6 and deduct it from your hit points"? You'd better not, even if you *told* the player the door was closed. The intention of the player is to look through the door; you can penalize them for looking through the door without checking for scythe traps, but you can't reinterpret their intention.

It's similar for PCs trying to persuade or intimidate or deceive NPCs. Whether the player speaks in-character or out of character is irrelevant to the game; it's a matter of personal taste. And therefore, how the player expresses the things they want their character to say is irrelevant. It's the gist of what they say that matters.

I'm sure everyone has had an experience something like this: your character is trying to get information from a guard, and you say something that could be taken as disparaging the local lord. The GM then has the guard get angry, if the guard is loyal, or laugh it off, if the guard is somewhat cynical. Whether you stuttered, or sneezed in the middle of your speech, or whatever, is irrelevant; it's the intent to disparage the lord that matters.

So my answer to the question "should you roll for social interactions, or base it on role-play?" is: yes. You role-play to check for intent, you roll for the NPC's reaction to that intent, and you modify the reaction roll based on character ability and how the NPC feels about various keywords in what the player said.