Scaled Magic Sword

Here's another idea linked to the alternative magic sword I mentioned before. I know some people have bandied about the idea of scaling a magic sword with the character, so that a player doesn't ditch a +1 sword because they found something better. This is real easy to do in a descending AC system, using the same basic idea from the previous post: the magic sword treats all mundane armor as having an AC no better than the character's level.

Thus, a magic sword found by a 1st or 2nd level character is no different in combat than an ordinary sword, although it will resist or be immune to damage and can hit creatures immune to non-magic weapons. But as level increases, the defender's AC is capped, until at 9th level, a lord with a magic sword treats all opponents as if they were unarmored.

Again, I'm not sure I would use this personally, especially since I don't like the idea of magic weapons that scale. But there it is, for anyone who's interested.

Blog Carnival: Established Settings

This month's RPG Blog Carnival, hosted by Dice Monkey, is on established settings, in contrast to home-grown settings. Most of the time, I've used the latter. I've only used established settings twice. OK, four times. Four and a half.

Let's get the half a setting out of the way: very briefly, I ran a GURPS game on a BBS using a setting that appeared in Pyramid (I think. Or maybe it was in Space Gamer?) It was called The Hole. I call it half a setting because it was a very small locale with not a lot of background, more of a setting concept. Plus, we didn't get very far; it was the problems with running this play-by-BBS game (and playing in another one) that turned me off online gaming. But I digress. Because of the shortness of the game and the fact that almost none of the established setting details ever made it into play, I can't really comment on the quality of that setting.

The two settings I wasn't going to count at first were actually tightly-linked game-and-setting combos: Call of Cthulhu and Stormbringer. These games were pretty brief, too, but not as brief as the BBS game. Plus, I actually used the Cthulhu Mythos twice outside of a Chaosium game, so that qualifies it as a full setting.

One of the two remaining settings was the Yrth setting for GURPS, including the tie-in to GURPS Infinite Worlds. It's a fairly good setting, since it assumes actual medieval Earthlings transplanted with their cultures to a world with elves, dwarves and orcs. There's a map, and some sketch descriptions of the political break-down. The other was the Cidri setting for The Fantasy Trip, but the details of the setting never came into play, so maybe that doesn't count.

Still, there's something I learned from using these various settings. The purpose of an established setting is not really just to reduce the GM's workload, but mainly to provide a context for the players. They need to know what backgrounds are possible, what their characters would already know, what kind of things to expect. Fairly popular fictional settings, like Stormbringer, adapted to RPG form are pretty good for this, although not everyone has read or seen every fictional work (no matter how vehement some of our number demand that this not be so.) The Cthulhu Mythos may be overused, but it's one of the best established settings, regardless of your opinion of that setting. It's something practically everyone knows.

The other approach is to base cultural details on well-known analogues (historical or popular fiction) and provide summaries for the players. Yrth does this. The problem is that, as I learned, not every player will buy into every element of that setting. My Yrth game broke down because one of the players didn't like some of the things that I used which were part of the setting. The biggest problem was a secret in the setting material: there's a tie-in to GURPS Infinite Worlds, which appealed to me, but since the players didn't know about that, it worked a lot like a bait-and-switch: the shared context wasn't fully shared.

Cidri sort of fell into the sketchy analogues approach, but actually it provided practically nothing for the players to work with; it was mostly just an excuse for why there was such a huge variety of stuff and vast unexplored territories: it's the world's largest planet! And there's a veneer of de-mythologized fantasy (vampirism and lycanthropy are diseases, not supernatural at all, for example.) And a science-fictional backstory that can be used to hang a secret on. It wasn't a very satisfying established setting at all.

So, there's the lessons I learned: use settings that the players can buy into and get context from, and don't use  settings that have built-in secrets, especially if they go against the player expectations established at the beginning. Let secrets develop organically through play.

RPG Blog Carnival: Animal Characters

Another post for The Tower of the Archimage's blog carnival this month about animals in RPGs. This time, it's animal player characters. No, I don't mean "D&D for Dogs"; I mean playing an animal as a character race.

There's actually a couple ways you could wind up with an animal PC, beyond the obvious suggestion on the bottom of M&M p. 8. There's Polymorph Other, which in the pre-AD&D days did not include the chance of forgetting your humanity. Polymorph Other creates a character that is physically an animal (or monster,) but mentally a human (or whatever the character started as.) Some cursed items might have the same effect. The Reincarnation spell similarly causes a dead character to return as a random creature, not necessarily a normal character race. When druids from Eldritch Wizardry cast the spell, it's even biased towards animal forms.

Either way, these animal PCs aren't quite like ordinary animals, since there's an implication of human-level intelligence, plus the memories of an intelligent being. Which leads me to the conclusion that characters that begin as animal PCs might as well be of human-level intelligence as well. Roll the standard 3d6 for each ability score, but don't roll for gold; only cursed or reincarnated characters get to have equipment and cash.

Animal PCs always understand Common, but must learn to speak it as a separate action (only possible for Int 11+, or whatever the minimum score is for characters to add extra languages. The same applies to other languages, for Polymorphed or Reincarnated characters. PCs born as animals can also communicate with other animals of their type; this does not necessarily mean that "NPC" animals are of human-level intelligence.

Animal PCs other than those with human-like hands (rats, raccoons, primates) are normally unable to manipulate human tools. They may be able to clumsily manipulate them with their mouth or an appendage (tail, trunk;) those with Very High Dex are able to learn to manipulate items with human precision (Think: Max the Horse in Tangled, trying to stab the thief with a dagger wielded in his mouth.) Those with Extremely High Dex have a 1/3 chance of being mildy mutated, giving them opposable thumbs (Think: Grommit.) There's also a 1/3 chance for such creatures to be able to walk upright for as long as desired, allowing them to pass for human (with the right costume...)

Animal PCs are all Fighters (or Thieves, for certain small species.) Characters with the appropriate level of Intelligence or Wisdom who can speak can change to a spell-casting class, using the standard class-change rules.

RPG Blog Carnival: Animals For Sale

Here's another post for The Tower of the Archimage's blog carnival this month about animals in RPGs. This time, I'm thinking about trained animals, particularly since some other participants in the blog carnival are writing up stats for new dog breeds. I've previously presented rules for figuring out the cost of horses, which could be extended to other animals, but perhaps I should rethink this a little and compare it to the rules for selling dragons. A dragon can be sold for 100 x (d6+1) gp per hit point. We can figure that the d6 represents variable demand and other animals will have more of a fixed price, perhaps 100 gp per hit point for something like an elephant. Let's interpret that as:

• base cost: 1 gp/hp
• huge: x10
• rare: x10

And for most animals -- not monstrous or fantastic creatures -- we'd use the average hit points rather than the actual hit points, which would be rolled later, without the player knowing the actual hit points.

Now, compare the mule, which costs 30 gp and has 2+1 hit dice. That's an average of 8 hp. A mule is definitely not huge, but it's substantially large and used as a pack animal, so we could set a multiplier of x4 for that and we've covered the cost. We can still use the other multipliers (x1.5 per talent/feature, x3 for war-trained) and that pretty much covers all imaginable animals. An ordinary dog, for example, would cost about 4 or 5 gp, with hunting or guard dogs costing at least 6 gp and wardogs costing 12 to 15 gp, perhaps more for larger dogs.

But how trained is trained? And how obedient is the animal?

RPG Blog Carnival: Animal Stats

The Tower of the Archimage is hosting a blog carnival this month about animals in RPGs. There's probably a couple different things I could write about that topic, but I'll start out with an examination -- and slight rant -- about problems with animal stats for RPGs and some possible solutions.

I'm already on record as being against the longer stat blocks in the 1e Monster Manual and later; I even get a little miffed at the stat blocks in Labyrinth Lord and Swords & Wizardry. My main beef is that I don't think common information should be included in a stat block; I prefer to only include information that is different from the norm, that makes a creature stand out, which is why I use the one-line stat block, like this:

Rat (Vermin)

# Appearing: 3d6 x 10; HD 1-3, AC 8, Move 18

This is all I need for a basic animal. Hit Dice and Armor change very frequently from creature to creature, as does the number appearing, so these will always appear in my "stat blocks". Move is usually 12, which I can leave out, but might be quite different for animals, based on locomotion method. I use 1d6 as base damage, up to 1d6 per full 4 HD, and modify the base by any additions or subtractions to the the Hit Dice, so I rarely need to note damage; these rats, for example, would do 1-3 damage. The word(s) in parentheses are a quick guide to creature behavior and function; stuff like Frequency and Alignment get noted here if they are different than the norm ("common" and "neutral".) Any special abilities or behaviors would be noted in a couple short paragraphs, but for most animals, those two lines, name and stat block, are all I need.

MegaChasm

Some of you may be wondering why I was fiddling with stairs. I had this map idea for a while, partially based on a dream, partially based on some blog posts a week or two ago. What if you gave the PCs easy, central access to multiple levels of the dungeon, all at once? I started toying with the idea of a central chasm with ledges running around the edge on multiple levels, with stairs connecting the levels ... but not necessarily in order.

This is the map I started on about a week ago. It's finished now, but I was toying with the idea of a fancier 3d map that would show the levels clearer. I probably won't turn this particular map into a 3d Sketchup version; instead, I'll do another map based on the same idea, for use in a possible game I may be starting soon. So, I'm releasing this version of MegaChasm to you.


MegaChasm by John Laviolette is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Stock the main level, create your versions of the linked levels named on the map, and add levels to the central tower. And tell me about it!

Edit: Forgot to mention I'm including this post as part of this month's Blog Carnival on the topic of RPG Cartography.

Blog Carnival: Teaching Newbies

Something Frank Mentzer said on Dragonsfoot on how to get people interested in playing older editions of D&D meshed with this month's blog carnival topic of teaching the game:

Well *I* usually say something like...

"Can you give me 10 minutes?"

By that time I'll have 'em so deep into an adventure (no detailed PC to start -- just "you're a Fighter, fully equipped, okay? -- winging it all the way) that they can hardly believe it. "It's THIS easy? Whoa!"

I've been thinking of an approach like that, at the very least as a framework for organizing presentation in a tutorial rulebook, but also as a way of running an introductory game.

Blog Carnival: Carnival of Souls The RPG

I decided to try joining the Blog Carnival for the first time. The topic is "festivals and carnivals". Since I've been writing about InSpectres recently, the only game I ever ran at a convention, and since I've also been writing about surrealism and "eerie gaming", I thought I'd combine the three ideas into "Carnival of Souls The RPG".

Carnival of Souls is a semi-obscure horror movie from the '60s. It looks and feels a lot like a Twilight Zone episode: the sole survivor of a fatal car crash tries to forget about it and get on with her life, but weird things begin to happen to her... This game starts with the same basic concept: the characters have all been involved in a catastrophic accident and escaped.

The base rules are the UnSpeakable variant of InSpectres. Disregard the "UnSpeakable Skills" (they're too Lovecraftian.) Keep Sanity. Each character has one talent, something they care deeply about, either their job ("church organist") or a hobby ("mystery novels") or activity ("chatting up strangers".)

Start with a Pit of 10-20 dice. In addition to the Pit, there's another pool of dice that starts out empty, called The Carnival. Every time a character loses Sanity, add one die to The Carnival. A high 1 roll for physically dangerous actions means death, but only if the character's Sanity is lower than the Carnival dice. Otherwise, the character nearly dies, but miraculously survives; the unsettling nature of their escape from death requires a Sanity roll against Dark Despair.

There is also a real abandoned carnival or amusement park at the outskirts of town. It, too, is unsettling, and requires Sanity rolls: 1 die for first daytime and nighttime encounters, half Sanity dice for actually entering the carnival, further rolls for unsettling events that occur there. Any time the character walks, runs, or drives anywhere, roll at least 1 Sanity die. If they lose a point of Sanity, they somehow wind up at the abandoned carnival.

Any time a character uses their talent (plays the organ, for the church organist,) they are in danger of entering an eerie trance. Roll a Sanity die; the character is entranced on a 1; they will behave oddly or even sinisterly while ignoring their surroundings. Any PC who witnesses an entranced character must also roll for Sanity.

If a player needs an extra die to roll for an action, they can use one Carnival die. However, any high 1 or 2 result when using a Carnival die means that The Man shows up. He is a mysterious, sinister-looking figure who cannot be seen except by the PCs. His appearance always requires a Sanity roll against Dark Despair, at the very least. He will not communicate or interact directly with the characters the first time he appears, just stare. He becomes more direct each time he appears; if he appears when there are at least 3 Carnival dice remaining, from now on he will pursue PCs when he appears. The first time he appears at the abandoned carnival, he will begin to openly communicate. A roll of 6 on any action will cause him to disappear.

When a character loses all Sanity, the Man appears again. From that point on, he can be temporarily evaded like any other pursuer, but he will mysteriously catch up any time a 1 or 2 is rolled on an action. Remember, rolling a 1 on a dangerous action at this point will mean death.

The PCs are supposed to be dead, of course, but something is keeping them in the world of the living unnaturally. For one, their dead bodies weren't recovered. There may also be something they need to finish. The exact task is left open, to be investigated like a mystery. Every roll of 6 while investigating the mystery earns one Mystery point. Once 10 points are earned, any characters who are still sane get a second chance on life, while those who have lost all Sanity vanish; their dead bodies are then found, and their spirits join The Carnival.