here’s a two weapon fighting implementation

November 19th, 2012

The easiest way to balance two-weapon fighting is to model it on shield use: in other words, give it an almost negligible effect. Still, it should call enough attention to itself that it doesn’t totally disappear on the character sheet.

Here’s an implementation I just thought of:

You can dual-wield if you have a light weapon in your off hand. You make one attack roll.

ADVANTAGES:

You get a +1 to attack.

DISADVANTAGES:

On a hit, you hit with your main-hand weapon if you rolled an even number, and with your offhand weapon if you rolled an odd number.

Analysis:

Let’s leave two-weapon fighting out of the analysis for a minute. Shield vs. two-handed weapon is an interesting trade-off: for (in most editions) +1 AC, you lose 2+ points of damage (going from a d12 to a d8 weapon; possible decrease in strength bonus). It’s really hard to analyze this balance, which changes from edition to edition and from low to high level. But let’s say that this is reasonably balanced, with maybe a slight advantage for the two-handed weapon.

Now let’s throw accuracy into the mix. How does +1 to-hit compare to +1 AC? They’re pretty symmetrical, but I’d say to-hit is a little better. A fighter makes an attack roll nearly every turn, but doesn’t use AC every turn: some enemies use attacks that target other defenses/saving throws.

With my two-weapon implementation, a character trades the +1 AC of a shield for +1 to hit, and pays a small cost in damage to balance it out. With a 50% chance of using your offhand weapon, you’re likely to do 4 damage (average of shortsword and longsword) instead of a shield-user’s 4.5 damage (with a longsword). That cost goes up if you have, say, a +2 longsword in one hand and an ordinary shortsword in the other.

With these three attack styles, you now have a pretty straight tradeoff between the three pieces of D&D combat: damage bonus (2H), AC bonus (shield use), and attack bonus (2WF).

Another fun application of this two-weapon-fighting system: it buffs unarmed fighting. Nearly all boxers fight with both fists, so they get +1 to hit. Based on the die roll, they’ll throw a left hook or a right cross, which, in most cases, won’t matter since both do the same amount of damage.

Tags:
Posted in 4e D&D, RPG Hub | 6 Comments »

have you read Playing at the World yet?

November 16th, 2012

I thought I knew a reasonable amount of D&D history, but after reading Jon Peterson’s Playing At the World, I feel a sort of amused contempt for my past self, that poor ignorant yokel. I no more knew the ingredients of D&D than I did the secret recipe of Coca-Cola. You should read it so you can feel smug too.

Why should a book that’s concerned largely with D&D prehistory be interesting to D&D players? My new favorite author Jon Peterson puts it well: “For all its long-windedness, Dungeons & Dragons is hugely underspecified: many of the core principles of its system are tacit ones, so familiar to the authors that they were blind to the need to record them. Only by a very close reading of the earliest rules, and by placing elements in their proper context in the tradition of wargaming systems, can we even conjecture about the intention behind these ambiguities and omissions. As usual, our familiarity with later versions of the game hinders us rather than helps us; we must forget what the game became in order to discover how and why it got there.”

Here’s how good this book is. Peterson’s book is 720 pages, and while I was reading it, I was constantly wishing it was longer.

This book shed light on a lot of things that I’ve wondered about, sometimes on this blog.

In 2010, I wondered, “What is a midgard?” and wished I could get the rules for one. http://blogofholding.com/?p=265 Now I know a lot about the spread of midgard-style games, the play-by-mail milieu in which they existed, and the reasons that most of them petered out before they really began.

In 2012, I thought, “Look at all these dowels in the Chain Mail rules! That’s cool!” Now I know that the use of dowels to mark altitude comes from the Fletcher Pratt naval game, where “airplane models are attached to a notched pole, where each notch measures a level of elevation at which craft may fly.”

It’s also shocking to see the term “Saving Throw” in Tony Bath’s 1966 medieval combat rules (which inspired Chain Mail). “City militia may only attack heavy infantry if they can throw a 5 or 6. If attacked by them they must throw a 4, 5, 6 to stand, otherwise break and are diced for… If fighting takes place, one throw per 5 men, militia lose half total, no saving throw, cavalry lose one-quarter, saving throw of six.”

There’s lots more good stuff, including many details of Arneson’s original game rules. For instance, Arneson said that “players were not intended to become harder to hit and take more damage as they progress. Instead they were to take the same amount of hits all the time (with the exceptions of spells, magic, etc.) while becoming more talented in inflicting hits and avoiding the same. This has a great equalizing influence.” Imagine a version of D&D where HP stays the same while AC goes up as characters gain levels.

In short: Grab a copy. If you’re a subway commuter reader, like me, get the kindle version: 720 is a lot of pages.

Posted in legacy D&D, news, RPG Hub | 10 Comments »

here’s me for 35 years not knowing about snakewood

November 14th, 2012

Apparently there’s a real thing called a snake-wood tree. Its wood has a wavy grain and it has two or three trunks.

I’m sort of ashamed that I didn’t a) either know about this wood already or b) independently invent it for use in my D&D campaign. Now that I think about it, the existence of something called “snakewood” in a fantasy campaign should be axiomatic.

Here are some corollaries:

  • The Staff of the Serpent is made of snakewood.
  • If you case Sticks to Snakes on snakewood, the spell does not expire.
  • There’s a magic item called a Snakewood Bow. The arrows it fires turn into snakes in flight: on a hit, it lands on, and bites, its target, for 3d6 poison damage (save for no damage). On a miss, the snake lands adjacent to the target: it is alive and hostile, and is a level 1 (or 1 HD) monster. The snake vanishes once it has bitten a target or when it is killed. The Snakewood Bow can fire twenty snake-arrows a day; after that, it acts like a +1 bow.
  • Snakewood walking stick: This looks like a walking stick, not a weapon, but it looks like one that a jerk like Lucius Malfoy would use. It acts as a +1 club. At will, the owner can make it hiss or rattle. The walking stick has three charges, which are refreshed every day. On a melee hit, the owner can expend a charge to have it bite the target: the target must make a fortitude save vs. poison or take 2d6 damage and become Dazed on the next turn.

    Something that the owner of the snakewood walking stick will have to learn from experience: if it’s used to attack a yuan-ti, it will twist and attack its owner, using the attack roll that was intended for the yuan-ti.

    • Posted in RPG Hub | 3 Comments »

    run your own mearls!

    November 12th, 2012

    I’ve been working on admin tools for my mearls software (the play-by-poll D&D game that we’ve been playing on this site for more than a month now). Now you can start your own mearls: you can either play a private, invitation-only game, or you can run one like mine, where anyone can join in.

    Start your own mearls!

    This is pretty beta at this point. I’d like you to send bug reports, suggestions, requests for clarity, etc to paul at blog of holding dot com.

    If you’d like to embed your mearls in your website, you can use code like
    <iframe src=xxxxx width=250 height=450></iframe> (where xxxxx is the URL of your mearls game).

    I’d like to ask another favor: if you start a game, email me a link to the game! I’ve been DMing for a while and would like to play in a couple of games too.

    Posted in RPG Hub | 1 Comment »

    treasure you can’t spend

    November 9th, 2012

    In Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, a character – wait. Are you ready for spoilers? Ready? Ready? Ready? OK, here they come – ends up with a giant shipment of silver bars, each stamped with a symbol indicating its purity. Everyone else believes that silver was sunk at sea. The character is rich – but he can’t figure out how to spend the money. The stamps, which prove the silver’s purity, also indicate its true owner.

    There’s a long D&D tradition of presenting players with logistical challenges along with treasure (“how will I move this fortune in copper coins?”) This might be a fun one for players.

    Imagine a scenario where the players ended up with similarly-stamped bars of silver. Here are the problems they have to face:

    It’s hard for medieval people to exactly determine silver purity. With the stamp, a bar of metal is just as valuable as silver coinage of the same weight. However, honest merchants will not take the metal. Dishonest ones will fence the bars, but take a cut.

    If the metal is melted down or the stamp is cut off, the metal will trade at less than its normal value, since it’s hard to determine whether it’s been mixed with lesser metal. Maybe 75% of its real value? Anyway, how will the players melt down the silver? Silver’s melting point is 1760 Farenheit, much hotter than a campfire. Do the characters own a forge? If they travel to a forge, they’ll have to make sure the stamped treasure avoids inspection. If they scrape or blur the stamp, the bars will still arouse suspicion.

    Players will have no problem coping with these challenges: they’re extremely clever when it comes to matters of profit. Give them the logistical challenge. See what they come up with.

    Tags:
    Posted in news, RPG Hub | 5 Comments »

    new rules for building castles

    November 5th, 2012

    I’ve had a few thoughts about the logistics of PCs building strongholds. There are existing rules for pricing out castlebuilding: OD&D and 1e have their own in the core rules, 2e and 3e have splatbooks, and ACKS has a pretty well-thought-out system. I don’t want to re-invent any of these rules. Instead, I have a few logistical tweaks I think could be added to any of them (to make castle building even more complicated).

    Casting a Castle

    According to the 1e DMG, it takes 2 to 6 years to build a castle. That means that if I began a citadel in 2006 (at the same time as the launch of Twitter, say) it might just be finished now. Some campaigns have five-year chunks of downtime and some don’t: I thought it would be cool if characters in more high-speed campaigns also had a way to build castles. On the other hand, the various castle-building costs shouldn’t be circumvented.

    Here’s a spell/ritual to speed up building:

    Unseen Builders (level 3 wizard spell/ritual)

    This spell creates a host of unseen servants, each of which acts as a laborer. By using this spell, a wizard can condense months of construction into mere days.

    The cost of this spell, in magical components, is exactly the same as the total cost of building the structure without magic, including the cost of materials and human laborers.

    The casting time of the spell is 1/30th of the time it would normally take to build the structure (one day per month). During the multi-day casting of this spell, the wizard works twelve hours a day, can eat and sleep, but can cast no other spells.

    Extra expenses:

    -An architect must be hired to design the building. If the building is to be exceptional, some master craftsmen and artists must be hired as well.
    -The unseen laborers can range as far as 1 mile away from the building site, which usually allows them to fell trees, quarry local stone, and mine a small amount of iron. Any more exotic materials must be gathered at extra expense.
    -Casting this spell is extremely taxing. NPC wizards usually charge an additional 10% to 20% of the cost of the building as their fee.

    Alternate Sources of Stone

    Last week I wrote about the many ancient ruins that clutter the D&D landscape. According to The Medieval Machine, by Jean Gimpel, medieval builders often found it cheaper to tear down existing buildings rather than quarry new stones. Therefore, PCs might end up re-purposing ancient structures, potentially with mystic side-effects. You could make up a chart like this one to determine the closest source of stone:

    Is there an alternate source of stone? (roll d20)
    1 a ruined giants’ castle: cost of building is increased by 25% but every structure has 50% more hit points or other defensive advantages than normal.
    2 A ruin of a high-magic empire: cost of building is reduced by 20%, and the final building is provided with ever-burning torches, doors that open at a password, and other conveniences.
    3 Ruin of a recent empire: cost of building is reduced by 20%.
    4 Holy construction of the ancient gods: if you dare to mine it for stone, the final building is shining white and has 2x normal HP. However, during construction, each worker (or Unseen Builder wizard) will be targeted once by a curse, typically a 10d6 lightning bolt (save for no damage). This is likely to cause an extremely high casualty rate, low morale, delays, 3x or more the normal building costs.
    5 demonic ruin: if you dare to mine it for stone, the final building will be black and jagged, covered with crawling purple runes, and will fire invisible bolts against all attackers as if its walls were fully garrisoned with archers. However, after every 100 nights spent in the building, each inhabitant must make a saving throw or accumulate one neurosis, phobia, or obsession. After 3 such failed saving throws, the inhabitant will go completely mad.
    6 Elven ruin: cost of building is reduced by 20% and everyone compliments you on how beautiful it turned out.
    7 Ruin from the empire of mad archmages: Stone is mined from a Gygaxian death trap. Cost of building is increased by 10%; 5% of the workers are killed by traps or monsters; but mechanical trap construction costs 10% of normal, and you may catch three random monsters for the defense of your structure.
    8 Bizarre ruin: structures are made of lava or skulls or something. Your architect must make an Intelligence check. On a failure, the architect cannot work with this material. On a success, the final structure gains some unique ability.
    9: The local quarry stone is very hard: +10% to building cost and to HP of all structures.
    10: The local quarry stone is soft: either spend +10% building cost on imported stone or the final building has -10% hit points.
    9-18: The closest source of stone is a regular quarry. No effect on prices.
    19-20: Choice of several ruins or quarries nearby. Roll d10 on this chart twice.

    Tags:
    Posted in RPG Hub | 3 Comments »

    a history of 50 years of misrule

    November 2nd, 2012


    My principal authority for the history of Costaguana is, of course, my venerated friend, the late Don Jose Avellanos, Minister to the Courts of England and Spain, etc., etc., in his impartial and eloquent “History of Fifty Years of Misrule.” That work was never published–the reader will discover why–and I am in fact the only person in the world possessed of its contents. I have mastered them in not a few hours of earnest meditation, and I hope that my accuracy will be trusted.
    –Nostromo, by Joseph Conrad

    Joseph Conrad’s fictional book “History of Fifty Years of Misrule” is an example of one of the best quest Macguffins ever.

    People sometimes underrate the Macguffin (a quest object that the fiction or RPG characters care about more than the viewers or players). A good macguffin does more than act as bait for heroes: it can also generate adversaries.

    For instance, a James-Bond-type Macguffin, like the code to a satellite-mounted laser, suggests the types of people who would want it: various governments and terrorist groups. A fantasy macguffin that confers mystic power, like the One Ring, suggests various evil overlords who would like to wield it, misguided people who would like to use it for good, and stalwart folk who wish to destroy it.

    Consider the idea of a book called “History of Fifty Years of Misrule”, a memoir written by an honorable, disillusioned politician during a period of petty wars and tragically wasted opportunities. It might contain

    stories of political outrage; friends, relatives, ruined, imprisoned, killed in the battles of senseless civil wars, barbarously executed in ferocious proscriptions, as though the government of the country had been a struggle of lust between bands of absurd devils let loose upon the land with sabres and uniforms and grandiloquent phrases.

    It’s part of the fruitful “scandalous memoir Macguffin” tradition which I often associate with P. G. Wodehouse (although this one is a lot darker). Like any good Macguffin, this one suggests its own adversaries: throw the manuscript in the PCs’ lap, and they’ll inevitably clash with members of the following groups:

    its targets, the greedy, treasonous, or stupid people who don’t want its secrets revealed;

    its targets’ enemies, who want them punished. Some are motivated by justice, and some by ambition.

    scoundrels who want the document, to use as blackmail, or to publish in the name of widespread chaos.

    the author’s friends and relatives, who want it suppressed: if it’s published, the author and his family will accumulate many enemies.

    If the PCs end up with such a book, they’ll be the targets of a lot of schemes. The easiest thing they can do is to destroy it right away. Don’t make that an easy decision, though. The book might be worth a lot of money to a crime boss. The book might clear the name of a banished paladin whose daughter is asking the PCs for help. Furthermore, the book may hint that the Sword that Defends the Kingdom might not have been destroyed after all, but might be hidden in the treasure vaults of one of a cabal of corrupt nobles.

    The strength of the memoir as a plot device, I think, is that it allows the PCs to predict who’s going to come after them. You don’t need to take pains to introduce the above factions. The PCs can ask questions: “Whose reputation would be damaged by the book? Who would pay for this information?” It allows the PCs a lot of freedom in writing their own plot in a sort of political sandbox adventure. Are the PCs going to right wrongs and punish evildoers? Play villains against each other and milk them all for cash? If the PCs are proactive, the plot is up to them. On the other hand, if they lag, there’s plenty of people chasing them to keep things moving.

    Here’s a fun trick: if PCs read the book, describe its contents based on the alignment of the PC. To a lawful good character, it is a depressing work describing the kingdom’s squandered chances. To a lawful evil character, describe it as a fascinating collection of blackmail fodder. To a chaotic neutral character, say it’s a hilarious political farce, especially funny because it’s all true.

    “History of Fifty Years of Misrule” didn’t get the star treatment in Nostromo, because that novel already had another Macguffin: a shipment of silver from a contested mine. That’s also a good plot-driver: I might post about that one later.

    Tags:
    Posted in fluff/inspiration, news, RPG Hub | No Comments »

    real elves

    October 31st, 2012

    Happy Halloween! Although I’m in NYC, Hurricane Sandy didn’t play too many tricks on me. We have electricity, but lots of people don’t, including many of my colleagues, my office, and the subway system. It feels like a snow day.

    As a Halloween treat, enjoy this video of this totally normal guy who knows real elves. Once he took them to a Chinese restaurant! D&D Next writers take note: Elves like to eat chopsticks.

    Posted in RPG Hub | No Comments »

    mearls map

    October 29th, 2012

    Our play-by-suggestion D&D has been spelunking along nicely for a couple weeks now, and we’ve explored enough areas that things might be getting confusing. Here’s a map of the places we’ve been:

    (click to enlarge)

    Where should we go next? Make a suggestion on the sidebar!

    Posted in RPG Hub | No Comments »

    dresden files magic system

    October 26th, 2012

    Magic is a kind of energy. It is given shape by human thoughts and emotions, by imagination. Thoughts define that shape–and words help to define those thoughts. That’s why wizards usually use words to help them with their spells. Words provide a sort of insulation as the energy of magic burns through a spell caster’s mind. If you use words that you’re too familiar with, words that are so close to your thoughts that you have trouble separating thought from word, that insulation is very thin. So most wizards use words from ancient languages they don’t know very well, or else they make up nonsense words and mentally attach their meanings to a particular effect. That way, a wizard’s mind has an extra layer of protection against magical energies coursing through it. But you can work magic without words, without insulation for your mind. If you’re not afraid of it hurting a little.
    -Jim Butcher, Fool Moon (Dresden Files 2)

    This is a pretty good kernel of a magic system. Someone should make a pen-and-paper RPG of the Dresden files.

    If I could have had both potions going in my system without them making me too ill to move, I would have downed the refresher potion the moment I got my hands on it, but without the blending potion, there was no way I could get inside to MacFinn.

    I haven’t read it – does the Dresden Files RPG have a potion miscibility table?? If so, count me in.

    Posted in RPG Hub | 5 Comments »

    « Older Entries
    Newer Entries »