bunny wights

December 5th, 2011

My wife “misremembered” some Eddie Money song lyrics:

Take me home tonight!
I don’t want to be a bunny wight

A bunny wight certainly doesn’t seem like the scariest kind of wight imaginable. Is there any way it could be given enough gravitas that it wouldn’t seem like something out of an April Fools edition of Dragon Magazine?

I think things from under the sea can be scary, so let’s say the bunny wights in question emerge, dripping and slimy, choked with weeds, from an angry ocean. They’re tall and anthropomorphic: pooka sized, taller than humans, with huge webbed bunny feet. They’re scaly instead of furry, as befits fishy creatures, and maybe with those rows of hundreds of sharp teeth possessed by predatory fish.

Bunnies are not predatory animals, though, so I don’t see bunny wights having the same hunger for human blood possessed by most undead. Rabbits are sort of tragic animals – the bottom of the food chain. Bunny wights come out of the water sad, leaden-footed, at the command of the creatures who once preyed on them. They walk in from the surf, one or two at first, with more behind, until an army of them is trudging on the shore, heads bowed, slimy ears dangling behind them like seaweed.

Each bunny wight has a thorn protruding from its chest: the claw that killed it. It’s a claw of the same terrible sea predator that now calls them to unwilling action. (Perhaps some spine-covered amenome from the far realms?)

I have a feeling that the bunny wights can fire their chest thorn as a weapon, and when they do, it tears out their heart and kills them.

I hope things work out for these bunny wights! They seem like they’ve had a tough time!

Posted in RPG Hub | 2 Comments »

sorcerers as wizards (and vice versa)

December 2nd, 2011

This will probably be my last post about Roger Zelazny’s “Dilvish the Damned” short stories, which turned out to be one of my favorite D&D-ideas-inspiring sourcebooks ever, joining the motley collection of African Civilizations and Theophile Gautier’s Captain Fracasse. A lot of Zelazny’s fiction seems to be directly translatable to RPG content. And I haven’t even started Amber yet!

3e+ D&D takes a bunch of words for spellcaster that all used to mean the same thing – wizard, sorcerer, warlock – and makes them all different classes. In OD&D, Gygax took all the synonyms for wizard he could find and made them level titles – to lock up IP from potential competition, he said. But you can’t really copyright these words, and other authors are going to redefine them in their own ways.

Here’s Roger Zelazny’s definitions of wizards and sorcerers from Dilvish the Damned:

“But if that isn’t sorcery, what is?”

“Sorcery,” she replied, “is an art. It requires considerable study and discipline. One must generally apply oneself for a fairly long period even to obtain the relatively modest status I have achieved. But there are some other routes to magical power. One might be born with a natural aptitude and be able to produce many of the effects without the training. This is mere wizardry, however, and sooner or later–unless one is very lucky or careful–such a one gets into trouble from lack of knowledge concerning the laws involved in the phenomena. I do not believe that this is the case with your lady, though. A wizard usually bears some identifying mark visible to others in the trade.”

This definition – with sorcerers as academic porers over tomes and wizards as natural talents – is hilariously opposite the descriptions of wizards and sorcerers from third edition. Even many of the same words are used in the (swapped) descriptions. In the 3.5 PHB, sorcerers have “inborn talent” and “cast spells through innate power rather than careful training and study“. They are even “marked as different by their power“, like Zelazny’s wizard. The PHB wizard, on the other hand, must spend “years in apprenticeship“. Magic is “not a talent but a difficult art.”

This kind of thing will happen a lot when you start ascribing different meanings to synonyms. For example, a different fantasy author could easily decide that hobgoblins were smaller than goblins. You’d also be perfectly justified in making goblins, hobgoblins, elves, dwarves, gnomes, and trolls all the same species.

Tags:
Posted in news, RPG Hub | 4 Comments »

Faster and More Deadly Combat – New House Rules for D&D 4e

November 30th, 2011
Orcs

These orcs should be easier to kill and do more damage!

Premise: Monsters and PCs should take about 3-4 hits to reduce to 0 Hit Points with most attacks across all levels. Thus, critical hits, lucky damage rolls, or high damage powers have a decent chance of bloodying or even sometimes outright killing some opponents with one hit, and this should remain true from level 1 all the way up to level 30.

The way the system currently works is that monsters and PCs start out taking about 3-4 hits to bring down to 0 Hit Points at level 1. For example, a fighter at level 1 might do 1d8+5 damage, which will kill a level 1 soldier (with 32 hit points) in about 3-4 hits. However, by level 11, the same fighter with level appropriate gear and feats needs about 5 hits with a normal attack to kill a level 11 soldier.

To see the current math behind monster hit points and damage used for D&D monsters, check out the Monster Manual 3 on a business card!

As PCs level, monsters take more hits to kill, which means combats drag on and become more monotonous. Combats can go from taking 1-2 hours at lower levels to 3+  hours at higher levels!

These changes are designed so that most PCs and monsters (Skirmishers, Leaders, and Soldiers) take about 3-4 hits to kill with most attacks (typically at-wills) throughout all levels of play. Brutes and defenders take about 4-5 hits to take down. Lurkers, Artillery, and weaker PCs take about 2-3 hits.

Generally, this makes combat faster and more dangerous across all levels, while still maintaining the tactical choices that make 4th edition so interesting.

Monster Hit Points: Monsters’ hit points now use the following formulas:

Posted in 4e D&D, RPG Hub | 3 Comments »

a team of iron horses

November 28th, 2011
Her companion wore black breeches and green jacket and boots. His cloak was black, lined with green, and he wore a sword and dagger at his waist. He sat astride a black, horse-shaped creature whose body appeared to be of metal.
-Dilvish the Damned by Roger Zelazny, 1965
Rod froze, hand on the pommel of his sword; then he dug his heels into Fess’s metal sides, and the great black horse sprang toward the ruckus.
-The Warlock in Spite of Himself by Christopher Stasheff, 1969

Meanwhile, in Aquilonia’s nighted capital, the chariot of thulandra thuu rumbles through the streets… drawn at high speed by a creature which, to a casual observer, might appear to be a large black stallion… but which a closer inspection would reveal to possess a strange, metallic sheen, as if it were carved of gleaming iron.
Conan comic based on Conan the Liberator by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, 1979.

What’s up with swords and sorcery being so hung up on black robot horses? I ran into these three just in books I read this year. Two of these sources predate D&D’s Obsidian Steed.

Tags: ,
Posted in legacy D&D, RPG Hub | 3 Comments »

the give and take of D&D and fiction

November 25th, 2011

Here’s an example of cross-pollination between D&D and pulp fantasy:

Roger Zelazny began his series of “Dilvish the Damned” fantasy short stories in 1964. Zelazny was influential on D&D: Gygax says that Zelazny’s Shadow Jack inspired the thief class, and Dilvish’s Elf Boots inspired the Boots of Elvenkind.

In Zelazny’s 1981 Dilvish the Damned story “Tower of Ice”, the influence seems to be going the other way:

Black completed the spell. They remained motionless for a brief while after that. Then: “That’s it?” Dilvish asked.
“It is. You are now protected through the second level.”
“I don’t feel any different.”
“That’s how you should feel.”
“Is there anything special that I should do to invoke its defense, should the need arise?”
“No, it is entirely automatic. But do not let that dissuade you from exercising normal caution about things magical. Any system has its weak points. But that was the best I could do in the time that we had.”

Maybe Zelazny re-invented the concept of second-level spells, but there’s no reason to think he did. And there’s no reason to think he should. An environment where authors are free to borrow from each other is one where they can build on each others’ work. A lot of D&D-influenced fantasy and fantasy-influenced D&D from the 80’s is kind of like the Chthulu Mythos in this way: written by multiple authors, but sharing so many genre assumptions and pieces of lore that they’re practically set in the same universe.

Now here’s something that Zelazny’s “Tower of Ice” can give back to D&D:

He had escaped from Hell itself, after two centuries’ torment. Most of the humans he had known were long dead and the world somewhat changed. Yet the one who had banished him, damning him as he did, remained–the ancient sorcerer Jelerak. In the months since his return, he had sought that one, once the call of an ancient duty had been discharged before the walls of Portaroy. Now, he told himself, he lived but for vengeance. And this, this tower of ice, one of the seven strongholds of Jelerak, was the closest he had yet come to his enemy. From Hell he had brought a collection of Awful Sayings–spells of such deadly potency as to place the speaker in as great a jeopardy as the victim should their rendering be even slightly less than flawless. He had only used one since his return and had been successful in leveling an entire small city with it. His shudder was for the memory of that day on that hilltop, rather than for the icy blasts that now assailed him.

Use Awful Sayings as a form of treasure for wizards. More powerful than spells, they can have campaign-level impications. Once memorized, an Awful Saying stays memorized until you use it – then it is gone forever.

Casting an Awful Saying requires a saving throw. Failure results in some terrible, random, Deck of Many Things-style misfortune happening to the caster and his friends.

Because these spells can only be used once, and they might backfire, they might provide a tantalizing form of temptation/resource management for the wizard.

Example Awful Sayings:
Raze City A city, or an area the size of a city, is completely blasted and destroyed.
Damn A single being is killed and sent to be tortured at the bottom of the Abyss for all eternity.

Tags:
Posted in 4e D&D, fluff/inspiration, news, RPG Hub | 2 Comments »

one monster per dungeon

November 21st, 2011

I’ve read a lot of the same sword and sorcery/sword and planet fantasy that inspired D&D, and so I’ve read about adventurers exploring a lot of proto-dungeons: ancient tunnels and sewers, labyrinths left by wise alien races, and buried cities. One difference that strikes me between these literary dungeons and a standard D&D adventure is that, however sprawling they are – however many twists and turns the heroes take in the Cimmerian darkness – most literary dungeons contains approximately one monster. This rule goes back to the ur-D&D dungeon, Theseus’s labyrinth.

In this way, pulp-fiction spelunking is more like the classic D&D wilderness adventure than dungeon adventure. While a few D&D groups explicitly engaged in hex crawls, many overland D&D trips last for exactly one wilderness encounter.

Could a book be more D&D-y, or D&D be more literary? Well, a dungeon crawl of eight or ten encounters would play hell with the fast, location-heavy pace of your standard pulp novel, and most of the wandering monsters would be excised by an editor wielding Occam’s razor or Chekhov’s gun.

On the other hand, how would it feel to play a D&D game where you were exploring a big, dusty dungeon where you might, or might not, run into the dungeon’s singular supermonster? Would it lead to a) tension or b) boredom?

Posted in RPG Hub | 3 Comments »

escape the city within an hour

November 18th, 2011

“You might call it a game,” said the youth. “When the bell completes its song, several strokes hence, the maze will be laid. You will then have an hour until it strikes again. If you have not found your way out of town and away from here by that time, you will be crushed by the buildings’ rearranging themselves once more.” “And why the game?” Dilvish asked, waiting out another tolling before he heard the reply. “That you will never know, Elfboot, whether you win or lose, for you are only an element of the game. I am also charged to warn you, however, that you may find yourself under attack at various points along whatever route you may choose.”
–Dilvish the Damned, Roger Zelazny

Wow, this sounds more like the setup of a D&D set-piece adventure than it does a piece of fiction! You don’t have to go very far to turn it into quite a usable episode.

This would work quite well in older versions of D&D, with their emphases on mapping and time management, but this adventure would also be a good excuse to bring such elements into a 4e game, as a sort of minigame.

The maze in the story features two guys who keep on popping up, and Dilvish isn’t sure which to trust. This is sort of a disguised liar-and-truthteller problem, with the addition of a time limit, which makes things less cut-and-dried.

There are also fun events like this one:

Immediately the flagstones about him were raised like trapdoors and figures rose up from out of the ground beneath them. There were perhaps two-score men there. Each bore a pikestaff.

Nothing like bad guys popping simultaneously out of 40 trapdoors to tell the PCs “Don’t go this way”.

Tags:
Posted in 4e D&D, fluff/inspiration, news, RPG Hub | 2 Comments »

how to sail

November 16th, 2011

The 4e removal of the 3e “Craft” and “Profession” skills didn’t really make much of a difference to me, for the most part. As the 4e people say, “If you want to be a baker, just write ‘baker’ on your character sheet.” Baking doesn’t come up much in my campaign, more’s the pity. Sailing, might, and I kind of miss having a skill for it.

How do you handle sailing checks? Do you use balance checks for running the rigging? Nature checks for spotting storms? I couldn’t even decide what attribute is the key one for sailing a ship. You could make an argument for several: Dexterity for climbing the rigging, Intelligence for doing navigational calculations, etc.

Thinking about that, it seems logical to make sailing be a whole-party skill challenge. However, since there aren’t really enough appropriate skills, maybe they should just be ability checks.

Here’s how you might handle a storm at sea:

“A sail breaks loose. Someone strong needs to haul on the rope before a mast breaks.” The fighter makes a Strength check to haul on the rope.

“A wave hits the ship’s quarter, sending the wheel spinning and breaking the helmsman’s arm. Someone with a high Constitution needs to grab the wheel and hold it straight, no matter how much abuse they take from the wind, rain, and bucking of the wheel. Not the fighter, he is still hauling on the rope.” The sorcerer, who has a decent constitution, grabs the wheel.

“Someone with a good Wisdom should climb up in the crow’s nest and watch the wind direction.” Cleric climbs into the crow’s nest. Etc.

If the party succeeds on half or more of their checks, they succeed at the challenge.

What should be the DC of these checks? Straight ability checks have much less variation than skill checks; and the few abilities and items that boost ability checks are often suboptimal choices and might as well be rewarded anyway. You can expect that if all the players are heroic level, using their best or second-best ability, they will have +3, +4, or +5 bonuses, plus half level. If the DC is 15 plus half level, allowing players to succeed on a d20 roll of 11 or better, a party of 3 or 5 characters would have about a 50% chance of success, and a party of 4 characters a 70% chance of success. If the DC is 10, an odd number of PCs have a 90% chance of success, and an even number has 95%. We’ll say, therefore, that DC 10+1/2 level is easy and DC 15+1/2 level is hard.

At epic levels, player abilities are higher: top ability bonuses average +7 instead of +4. Therefore, you can safely pitch more DC 15+1/2 level challenges at players, or, on the other hand, just let the PCs succeed more. One of the benefits of being high level is that you are good at everything, and that might translate into more sailing successes.

How is the re-usability of this skill challenge? If the PCs have a ship, they may face sailing challenges often. When a sailing check is needed, each PC can have an accustomed role. Everyone makes their check and the successes are tallied. There’s one or two roles per ability:

STR oarsman (or rope hauler, if needed)
CON helmsman (or pumper, if the skip is sinking)
DEX topman (rigging) (or weaponmaster, in ship-to-ship combat)
INT navigator (or sailmaster, to get maximum speed)
WIS lookout (or pilot, in dangerous waters)
CHA captain or mate (or leader of the boarding party, in shipboard combat)

Posted in 4e D&D, advice/tools, RPG Hub | 5 Comments »

crit cards and threat cards

November 14th, 2011

I dreamed I was playing a duel-flavored card game where you could play two types of cards on your opponent: “crit” and “threat”. Threat cards had point values, so as you played them, the Threat on your opponent mounted. Crit cards represented actual wounds, and each Crit card required you to discard a certain number of Threat points from your opponent.

It’s actually not a bad mechanic, I think, for a dream. As you apply more Threat to your opponent, you think: should I apply a minor Crit now? or should I wait till I can stack up more Threat and play a devastating Crit? If I wait, my opponent might find a way to lower his Threat.

I also posit that there are probably Action cards that have effects like lowering Threat and other special effects.

Here’s a sample of a dozen cards I just pretended to draw randomly from the nonexistent deck:

-Threat: Place this card next to your opponent. It represents a Threat of 5 points.
-Threat: ” 10 points.
-Threat: ” 10 points.
-Threat: ” 15 points.
-Threat: ” 20 points.
-Crit: Hampering injury. Discard Threat cards totaling at least 30 Threat to play this on your opponent. While this Crit is active, your opponent may not discard Threat cards.
-Crit: Beheaded. Discard Threat cards totaling at least 100 Threat to play this on your opponent. Your opponent is killed, and you win!
-Action: Breathing room. Discard one Threat card on your character.
-Action: Timely interruption. Discard all Threat cards on your character.
-Action: Riposte. Take one Threat card on your character and put it on your opponent.
-Action: Healing potion. Discard one Crit card on your character.
-Action: Haste potion. You may draw two extra cards.

Posted in game design, other systems, RPG Hub | 4 Comments »

When to use Sunder in 4e

November 11th, 2011

Cal-den struck him then backward against the dais, catching his blade in a black claw, shattering it, and he raised his other arm to smite him. Dilvish did then stab upward with what remained of the sword, nine inches of jagged length.
…
Dilvish came scrambling backward, until his hand came upon a thing in the rubble that drew the blood from it. A blade. He snatched at the hilt and brought it up off the floor with a side-armed cut that struck Cal-den…
Roger Zelazny, Dilvish the Damned

Illustration from Paizo's Mother of Flies.

D&D 4e doesn’t have abilities like Sunder that break weapons, because a) they asymetrically punish melee weapon users and b) they destroy potential treasure. Also, players generally get a magic weapon by around level 2, and in 4e, breaking a player’s magic weapon is pretty much against the rules.

But rules, like swords, are made to be broken.

Here’s one dramatic occasion for the villain to sunder your paladin’s +4 sword: when there happens to be a +5 Holy Avenger lying on the floor. It’d be pretty dramatic to have the paladin cast away his broken weapon and seize some ancient two-handed sword from among the treasure strewn on the floor, only to have it flare in his hands with radiant power. Probably more exciting than giving him the Holy Avenger after the battle and letting him peddle his old blade for 1/5 of its sale price.

Posted in 4e D&D, advice/tools, fluff/inspiration, RPG Hub | 4 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »