4e: spell scrolls for non-wizards

November 9th, 2011

Monday I talked about re-introducing copyable spell scrolls into 4e D&D, so that PC wizards can drool over the possibility of raiding a rival wizard’s library and finally learning Acid Arrow. This is fine, but it’s sad for non-arcane classes, who don’t learn their attacks from scrolls. It would be cool if the other power sources had ways to learn improved versions of their attacks, in ways that supported their flavor. Here are my ideas.

Expanded spellbook and rare spells for divine classes

Wizards and their friends aren’t the only seekers after lost knowledge. Divine classes, like clerics and paladins, should be able to earn alternate prayers, but it doesn’t make as much sense for them to find them in the library.

I see divine classes gaining powerful versions of at-will prayers by completing holy pilgrimages: visiting the cathedrals of the campaign world and praying at the relics of saints. Each large city might contain a cathedral to each of the major gods, each of which contains its own relic. Each relic might grant a boosted form of a specific at-will spell: for instance, in Greyhawk’s Cathedral of Kord, the hammer of St. Nimbus might grant a +1-per-tier damage bonus to the Storm Hammer power.

While the pilgrimages required to boost at-wills are well known, those required for encounter and daily powers are secreted in hidden shrines in dungeons and in the wilderness. These shrines can be discovered randomly, as a form of treasure analagous to the scrolls of the arcane classes.

Martial classes

Fighters, rogues, rangers, warlords, and other martial classes usually learn new and improved powers from trainers. A great duelist might teach an improved version of Sly Flourish : it does +1 damage if the attacker has high ground.

Some ancient martial moves can be learned from manuals. Each manual teaches one move, and is no longer than 80 pages, because martial types can’t usually finish a book that’s longer than that.

Finally, if your fighter doesn’t want to constantly consult gurus and books, improved powers can be taught by opponents. Elite monsters who use the same power as a fighter might be using an improved version. By seeing it in action, the fighter might learn the improved technique. (This makes martial classes into a sort of Final Fantasy blue-magic specialist.)

Other power sources

Primal classes probably gain new abilities through rites of passage. The barbarian, for instance, has a laundry list of tasks he needs to accomplish in order to unlock new daily powers: killing a dragon, for instance, or winning a wrestling match against a tree spirit. After the task is accomplished, the character needs to have a druidic rite performed (typically involving tattooing or branding) to unlock the new ability.

I don’t really understand the shadow source very well, but it seems to involve death. Shadow characters might have to find the lingering spirits of ancient emperors and cursed wizards and convince them to give up their secrets. This might involve pilgrimages to ancient ruined palaces, haunted houses, or cities in the shadowfell. Or, hey, just go to Hogwarts! There’s like 50 ghosts in there.

Psionic training probably involves traveling to Dagobah and finding a Jedi master.

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

4e spells as treasure

November 7th, 2011

In old D&D, spells were like Pokémon; if you encountered one you’d never seen, you could put it into your collection. This is a time-tested, addictive form of gameplay that I miss in 4e. Luckily, it’s easy to add back in.

4e wizards still have a spellbook, in which they can transcribe more daily, utility and encounter spells than they can cast. If there’s a spellbook, we can re-introduce spell scrolls.

spell scrolls for arcane classes

To return wizards to their place as library-ransacking completists, just add a few scrolls containing daily spells into the next treasure haul. As in earlier editions, these scrolls can be used to cast a spell a single time, or be transcribed into a wizard’s spellbook, permanently expanding the wizard’s reportoire.

I’d allow other arcane classes to transcribe scrolls into spellbooks too: they’d gain the wizards’ ability to swap daily powers, but only with spells they found as treasure.

Rare spells

Since 4e wizards already choose their two favorite spells for every spell slot, it’s hard to get excited about expending your spell repertoire: at best, you’re getting your third-favorite spell. Let’s say that some spell scrolls (20%?) might contain improved versions of spells. For instance, a wizard might find a scroll called “Flame Jester’s Improved Fireball”, which teaches a version of the Fireball spell that does +1 damage per tier. The benefit of such an improved spell is limited to that spell, and might be equivalent in power to that of a feat. Possibilities include:

  • +1 to hit or damage

  • adds a new damage type
  • conditionally adds a condition (for instance, dazes targets if you have combat advantage)

There’s a lot of daily spells, so this opens up a lot of design space for treasure. It also allows DMs to boost iconic but mechanically weak spells like Fireball without having to resort to house rules. I’d even think that a character could find an improved version of an at-will power. Gaining +1 damage to an often-used at-will power would be almost as good as finding a new magic weapon.

Research

With improved spells, we can bring back another staple of early D&D: spell research. If a PC can’t find a specific spell, they can research it. DMs and players can go crazy with rules for spending money on research, libraries, and labs.

To keep non-arcane classes from egtting jealous, they might need ways to upgrade their powers too. I’ll have to think about that.

Tags:
Posted in 4e D&D, game design, legacy D&D, RPG Hub | 8 Comments »

magic items Gygax forgot to steal from Zelazny

November 4th, 2011

But the wearer of the green boots of Elfland may not fall or be thrown to land other than on his feet.
Roger Zelazny – Dilvish the Damned

D&D’s Boots of Elvenkind are supposed to be drawn from Roger Zelazny’s Dilvish the Damned stories. If so, Gygax missed pillaging a few other magic items from the same stories:

Mildin shuddered and fetched her shimmering were-cloak–for she was Mistress of the Coven–and throwing it about her shoulders and clasping it at her neck with the smoky Stone of the Moon, she became as a silver-gray bird and passed out through the window and high about the Denesh.

Obviously a were-cloak lets you change form. I’m not exactly sure what the Stone of the Moon does. Something fey, I bet.

The guards had cornered the slayer. He fought them, apparently empty-handed, but parrying and thrusting as though he gripped a blade. Wherever his hand moved, there were wounds. He wielded the only weapon that might have slain the King of the World, who permitted none to go armed in his presence save his own guard. He bore the Invisible Blade.

It’s hard to know how to stat the Invisible Blade. Does it get a bonus to hit because it’s so hard to parry? If so, how is it different from other magical swords which also get bonuses to hit? Does it allow a thief-like backstab on the first strike?

To be fair to Gygax, he didn’t entirely miss the Invisible Blade. He statted it up, but buried it in near obscurity: in the character sheet of Gellor in the afterward to “Saga of Old City”. In the enworld Q&A he says:

As for the invisible sword that Gellor had, it was not in play in my campaign–not to say I hadn’t maybe placed one somewhere 😉 Aside from its plusses to hit and damage, the weapon allowed its wielder to see any otherwise invisible foe and to attack first in any normal exchange. Of course there was a command word for it to come to hand–pretty hard to locate your invisible sword without that… If it was within range of the possessor’s voice it woulc fly instantly to that own’s hand.

Tags:
Posted in fluff/inspiration, legacy D&D, RPG Hub | 6 Comments »

the ships that sail the desert

November 2nd, 2011

The desert is nearly impassable. Obviously it’s plagued by some giant sandworm-like creatures, as well as its environmental hazards. Surely someone crosses it, though! You have desert caravans in your D&D world, right?

Whoever the caravan masters are – humans? halflings? dragonborn in 4e? – they need some way to fight off the sandworms, blue dragons, and other high-level desert creatures. With food and water so scarce, there’s no way that hundreds of defenseless creatures – walking meals – are going to make it alive across the wastes, even if they do make a practice of hiring PCs as guards.

Since D&D is a post-apocalyptic game, the caravanners may well have cobbled together a Jawa sandcrawler-type vehicle from the magical vehicles of previous ages. It’s all Mad Max scrap metal, giant tank treads and armor, but seamed with golden light and bolted with runes. The desert crawler must be armed with a weapon powerful enough to keep the giant monsters at bay. Solar power is the traditional technology of all-knowing progenitor cultures, so let’s give it a mirror cannon that focuses beams of radiant energy.

No magic engine has survived from the ancient empires, so the desert crawler is powered by slaves in treadmills. The slaves are mostly the orcs and elves who live on the desert’s border. The caravan is always looking to buy strong slaves, so if the PCs are defeated in the desert by any intelligent opponent, they may wake up in a treadmill themselves.

How do the PCs escape from the caravan? Straying from the caravan’s oasis-dotted route invites death from thirst and sandstorm. Falling behind will put the escapees in the midst of the swarm of landsharks who pick off stragglers. Traveling ahead? Possible, but only the caravan leader has a map of the route.

The best option is the classic swashbuckling approach: free the galley slaves, throw the slavers to the sharks, and become a privateer on the desert sea.

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

how to make a werewolf creepy

October 31st, 2011


“The meat!” came a panted whisper. … He picked up the piece of meat and tossed it outside. It vanished immediately, and he heard the sounds of chewing. “That is all?” came the voice, after a time. “Half of my own ration, as I promised,” he whispered.

“I am very hungry. I fear I must eat you also. I am sorry.”

“I know that. And I, too, am sorry, but what I have left must feed me until I reach the Tower of Ice. Also, I must destroy you if you attempt to take me.”

“The Tower of Ice? You will die there and the food be wasted, your own body-meat be wasted.” …

The white beast panted for a time. Then: “I am so hungry,” it said again. “Soon I must try to take you. Some things are worse than death.”

–Roger Zelazny, Dilvish the Damned

I think that similar creatures in other books – often wolves, perhaps – apologize for their desire to eat the protagonist. Am I thinking of the Neverending Story? Something in Narnia?

Anyway, it’s not a bad trick for making a random encounter feel very creepy and personal, and a little sad as well. Play up the creature’s struggle as much as you want – maybe make it indebted to the PCs, to increase its guilt and anguish.

Ultimately, as much as a PC may feel sorry for such a creature, they’ll have to kill it, now or later; and it will be a mercy killing.

Like so many things in fantasy (and horror), including vampires, this creature’s relationship to the PCs seems like a symbol for some other, more disturbing human relationship. Fantasy handles these layers well. This is one of the reasons I’m not particularly interested in dealing with real-life disturbing issues in-game. Fantasy seems to me like a genre where these monsters are best transformed before they are fought.

Tags:
Posted in fluff/inspiration, legacy D&D, news, RPG Hub | 1 Comment »

there is no night without day! for serious

October 28th, 2011

Billboards depicting smart, well-dressed Indians enjoying soft drinks or cigarettes, or wearing the latest fashion creations, sheltered masses of naked homeless who lay wrapped in rags beneath their cheerful slogans. Roving throngs of orphaned children ran after the buses and wagons and rickshaws, chanting for coins or food or castoff objects. The stench of all this–the cooking, rotting, festering, putrefying–hung over the city like a malodorous cloud, reeking in the hot sun. To Spence it smelled like death. “The City of Dreadful Night,” said Adjani. “Look around you, my friend. You will never forget it.”
—Dream Thief by Stephen Lawhead

Your wretched D&D slum isn’t complete without a conspicuous-consumption foil to set it off. It might be a foppish noble and his retinue, scented handkerchiefs held to their nose, as they pick their way over the starving beggars; immense gates festooned with bronze cornucopias and grain sheafs; or cheerful torchlight and the sounds of music and laughter from the palace over the river as the poor townspeople die of plague or frostbite.

Also “The City of Dreadful Night” is not a bad name for your horrific D&D city. It’s the title of a pretty depressing poem about London as well as a pretty depressing Kipling story about an Indian city.

Tags:
Posted in 4e D&D, fluff/inspiration, RPG Hub | 1 Comment »

1001 Nights vs King Arthur’s knights

October 26th, 2011

I have heard, O auspicious king, that when Ghanim brought the chest to his house, he opened it and brought the girl out. On looking around, she saw that she was in a handsome house, spread with carpets and adorned in attractive hangings and so forth. On seeing bundles and bales of materials and other such things, she realized that here was a merchant of substance, a man of great wealth. She uncovered her face, looked at him and, discovering him to be a handsome young man, she fell in love with him at first sight.
-1001 Nights

Coming from a childhood spent reading about King Arthur, I find the world of 1001 Nights notable for its dearth of knights and lords. In Europe, the male heroes are the nobles – the hereditary warrior class. In 1001 Nights, successful warriors are almost absent. The storybook heroes are merchants.

In 1001 Nights, access to the upper class is gained through business. People with swords are usually among the lowest classes: city guards, bandits, and armed slaves. In that way, it’s closer culturally to us than is Arthurian legend. In the modern USA, rich businessmen are the closest thing we have to a ruling class, and people who live by physical violence – criminals, soldiers, cops – aren’t in positions of power.

Interestingly, while our modern culture is built on a 1001 Nights model, our entertainment is built on a Knights of the Round Table model. Adventure movie heroes are frequently violent strongmen, while non-physical businessmen are more likely to be villains than heroes.

Old D&D editions, with their emphasis on treasure hunting, enable both modes. Like 1001 Nights heroes, and the players, the PCs are after money. They live in a world where once you collect enough gold, you level up and become a Lord. There may be hereditary lords and nobles as window dressing, but the real powers in the world are the nouveau riche, and wealth is primarily in the form of coins (as in 1001 Nights) not land (as in Camelot).

On the other hand, D&D money is collected through force of arms. In OD&D, the XP value of a treasure haul is related to the strength of its defender. If you’re 8th level, and you defeat a lowly 5th-level creature to win a treasure hoard, you get 5/8 of the XP value of the treasure. So in D&D, you’re a violent thug AND you’re greedy. Best of both worlds.

Posted in fluff/inspiration, legacy D&D, RPG Hub | No Comments »

search for traps as an encounter power

October 24th, 2011

If PCs treat an old-school dungeon with any rational amount of caution, they will search every ten feet of floor for traps, listen at every door, and search every wall for secret doors. In other words, they’ll spam their at-will search abilities.

It’s a problem that Gary Gygax railed against in 1e:

Continual listening becomes a great bother to the
DM. While ear seekers will tend to discourage some, most players will
insist on having their characters listen at doors at every pretense.

4e has a general solution for spammed actions: make them encounter powers.

You could just make searching a regular encounter power, so it can only be done every five minutes, but I think it would be more interesting to make searches into a daily resource to be managed, like Fate points from Spirit of the Century-type games. During the day, you can search carefully for traps. Every time you search, and find nothing, you expend one of your searches. If you search and find something, you don’t expend a search. Furthermore, every time you blunder into a trap, you gain a use of your search power.

It makes sense narratively. If you’ve searched 100 consecutive doors for traps and found nothing, no matter how hard you try, you’re going to relax your vigilance. On the other hand, if you’ve been finding tons of traps, or if you see something about this door that makes you suspicious, you’re going to be far more alert.

We’ll leave all the search rules the way they are: we’ll just add to them. At the beginning of every day, every character gets a number of Search tokens equal to their Perception bonus. Rogues get, say, three extra tokens.

Whenever a PC wants, they can risk a Search token to get a +5 bonus to a Perception check. If the check doesn’t turn up anything interesting, they lose the token. If they find a trap, treasure, a secret door, or anything else hidden, they get to keep their token. Every time a PC falls victim to a trap, they get a Search token BACK. This represents their suddenly-increased attention level.

This system would reward players for searching judiciously, based on clues and intuition, not as part of a mindless sweep.

To compensate the PCs for their extra search power, every Perception DC in the game is 5 points harder.

I think this would encourage people to play the way that Gary wanted them to play: to search for traps and listen for monsters judiciously, when they have a reason to be suspicious – and to blunder blindly into the occasional ambush for the DM’s amusement.

Tags:
Posted in 4e D&D, RPG Hub | 13 Comments »

fire has a lineage

October 21st, 2011

The symbolic passing of the old god would be enacted, and every fire would be extinguished except for a single firepot guarded by the queen and her family at the temple. (Stalking Darkness, Lynn Flewelling)

This isn’t really explored in the novel, but if every fire is relit from the Queen’s fire, in some sort of cascading olympic torch relay, everyone ends up with a royal fire: a descendant of the fire lit by the Queen herself.

There might be some magic power in it too. Perhaps fires lit by certain kings and priests – and all their children fires – have magical powers. Fire has a lineage. In that case, an ordinary torch might become a magic treasure.

The Lineage of Fire actually strikes me as a decent idea for an entire campaign. There are many families of fire in the world, passed from generation to generation through candles and torches. The different fires may have different powers (the blue necrotic fire of the deeps, the golden radiant fire lit aeons ago by the Sun God, etc). The different lineages of fire war for dominance. The PCs may work for a fire instead of a noble house; and PCs’ torches might be among their most valuable weapons.

All of the fires of the world are united against some evils. This world is a circle of firelight, and hungry things prowl, outside, in the Dark, waiting for the flames to fail.

Tags:
Posted in 4e D&D, fluff/inspiration, RPG Hub | 3 Comments »

My simple XP rules: 1 XP per encounter

October 19th, 2011

I know I’ll never fully embrace OD&D because I hate using charts. I prefer simple, easily internalized rules, like 3e’s Base Attack Bonus, rather than 1e’s Attack Matrix charts. 4e’s XP system still has a big ol’ level-advancement chart at the center of it, along with XP entries for every creature in the Monster Manual (which I often don’t use).

The 4e XP system has been formalized and math-checked, which means one of D&D’s central problems is more obvious than it has ever been: it suffers from “inflating-numbers-that-don’t-do-a-goddamn-thing-itis.” At level 1, you fight 10 battles in order to collect 1,000 XP. At level 10, you fight 10 battles to collect 20,500 XP. The specific amount of XP per battle changes, but the number of battles doesn’t.

There’s a historical reason for that. In old D&D, your XP was tied to your income. Since high-level characters won richer and richer treasures, XP totals per level had to rise. Now that characters don’t get 1 XP per GP earned, however, there’s no reason that XP needs to stick to that inflationary model.

Besides, calculating XP is kind of a pain: it involves flipping around in various books to add XP from monsters and traps, and dividing by the number of PCs.

I can’t be bothered to calculate XP, but I’m not ready to totally dump the idea of leveling up. Having the DM bestow levels arbitrarily takes away some of the treadmill charm of D&D. So here’s the super-simple XP system I use nowadays.

Every level costs 10 XP.

Most battles provide 1 XP. Boss battles provide 2 XP.

Same with quests and skill challenges: 1 XP, or 2 XP for major quests/challenges.

There are some minor variations here from the standard XP system:

  • XP differences between hard and easy battles are not so granular. Personally, I think this is fine, especially since the difficulty of a battle often has as much to do with circumstances and terrain as with the XP budget.
  • Quest XP is vastly higher in my system. In standard 4e, a minor quest gives about 1/5 the XP of one encounter, and a major quest as much XP as one encounter. This is probably a tiny fraction of the XP gathered from battles along the course of the quest. Video game RPGs, on the other hand, often give huge quest XP bonuses. This is great, because it’s weird when saving the world grants much less of a reward than fighting a random encounter.
  • It’s impossible to forget. You can give XP on the fly without consulting any charts. In fact, the players can track the 1 XP for each battle: all you have to do is grant the extra XP for quests and boss battles.

    • Tags:
    Posted in 4e D&D, advice/tools, game design, RPG Hub | 11 Comments »

    « Older Entries
    Newer Entries »