Onslaught Six

Thirty and counting.
Connoisseur of fine trash.
Not ever gonna make it,
but then again, who does?

The dice exist to resolve ambiguity.

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  • Lessons from Caverns of Thracia

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    In January, we lost famous gaming pioneer Jennell Jacquays. Much has been written about her in that time. The day the news came down, I sent a message in my Discord that I would be running her classic Judge’s Guild module, The Caverns of Thracia, in OD&D (Original D&D from 1974), with a handful of house rules, partially inspired by Luke Gearing’s Snackrifice.

    I told the players that this was expected to be a one-off but could expand a little bit if we were having fun. I didn’t anticipate finishing the dungeon as it’s fucking huge, but I did figure we would get through to some of it. The first session had a total of 7 players and me–a real OD&D party! Scheduling eventually got in the way and after only two sessions, I could tell that this basically wasn’t working, for a variety of reasons. Let’s talk about what I learned.

    The first thing: OD&D is the wrong system for this module. For a while I was under the impression the module had been published in 1975, which is how I pitched it to my players.

    Part of this was ostensibly so I could deal with descending AC all on my side of the screen without the players worrying about it, but inevitably there was an argument about how descending AC works and what target numbers you actually want to hit were. Felt like a right of passage.

    Anyway, it turns out the module was released in 1979 according to the copyright. I had chosen OD&D because I was inspired by playing in Snackrifice and wanted to try running OD&D out. I had a few house rules–I added the Paladin and Bard classes from the original Strategic Review sources, but no others. I redid the equipment and weapon lists from Snackrifice, and tweaked a thing or two here and there. You can check out the house rules doc here.

    The problem is: Jacquays was on the fucking cutting edge of this shit. At one point there is a gnome who has Illusionist levels, something I hadn’t accounted for at all in my prep. There are several monsters not present in OD&D, but would have been in the Strategic Review or in Dragon or even in the AD&D Monster Manual by 1979. (These monsters are perfectly useable in OD&D, as they don’t even account for the AC changes in the AD&D 1e Player’s Handbook.) So, I was learning, there was a lot of stuff in the module that the system wasn’t really set up for. If I were to do it again, I’d use Old School Essentials with the Advanced Fantasy add-ons.

    The second thing: The group didn’t like the system. With 7 players, it’s hard to suit everybody. Most players of mine are happy to go along with whatever bullshit I’m doing and have a good time; some of them are clearly happier about doing an OSR dungeon crawl than others, and even those who clearly aren’t into it as much are happy to be a good sport to be in a game I’m running. I would say, though, that the overwhelming amount of my players ended up really chafing against 1975 standards, or even OSR standards in general.

    They balked at the idea that sometimes you want to roll the d20 high and sometimes you want to roll low (Thracia occasionally calls for roll-under stat checks), that sometimes situations call for a 1:6 chance and other times they call for a d20 check or even a saving throw, they balked at the weird saving throws and then further got frustrated and confused when the module called for a weird saving throw.

    (I recall one trap that called for a save vs. breath to avoid it; the player was baffled when I explained that vs. breath is typically “vs dragon breath, but sometimes they use it as a catch-all Dex save,” something many of us are comfortable with and accept, but honestly, they got rid of this shit for a reason.)

    Even if I had used a system like Old School Essentials, I don’t know that it would have “worked” for this particular group. Many of them have lots of 3.5e or 5e experience and would probably prefer a system with a unified resolution mechanic–something like bastards with its unified d20-roll-under-stat mechanic would probably have worked fine! Just player preference, is all. I could have decided to run this in 5e and those players would have been as happy as a pig in shit. (Not an indictment of 5e or those players, btw.)

    The third thing is that, even against those grains, the players had fun, and engaged in good faith. They engaged in a little bit of faction play, openly communicating with the lizardmen on two different occasions. They mapped their own dungeon and even let it get a little fucked up (but not too fucked up!), and checked for secret doors and all the normal bullshit. One guy got fucked up from a crit from the carrion crawler in the very first encounter, and immediately had that character’s son show up with the exact same stats, but with a fucking helmet this time. (I even gave that guy a save vs. Death at 0hp, which he sadly failed.)

    After 40 minutes or so, everyone was engaged in the OSR 70s mode as much as they could be, looking for ways to use their limited spells or abilities (the Bard charm came in handy twice!) to bypass encounters rather than engage in combat as first resort. They didn’t care about backstories, recognizing that the goal here was to get treasure, because treasure = XP.

    I also used my longstanding house rule of not dividing XP. If the players found 1000gp, they got 1000 XP. They still had to divide the gold up evenly amongst them. This meant that players started to level up pretty quickly early on, but I suspect this evens them out around 4th or 5th level. I don’t mind doing this in harder edged OSR systems (like OD&D or OSE) because we likely aren’t going to play longer than a handful of sessions. For some of these people, this might be the only time they ever play OD&D. Let them level up a little bit. It’s not going to hurt anything. I even didn’t make them go back to town or anything, just let them level up right there in the dungeon, like it’s Dragon Quest or something. These are all millennials who have been playing JRPGs their entire life, nobody gives a shit.

    Mind you, I think they got a little too much XP from monsters. Delving Deeper (and I think all of OD&D) says that monsters should give 100XP per hit die. That’s obviously a little too much especially if I’m not dividing them between players, so if I were using OSE or something that provided different numbers for monster XP, I probably wouldn’t have had that part of the issue.

    All in all, I still had a great time. I think if I’d ran with OSE to begin with, or chose a system with a unified resolution mechanic, then the game would have lasted a little longer. I was up for a third session, but we had scheduling problems and so I decided to call it good there, and no one seemed all that upset about it. One day I’ll return to Thracia–hopefully after Goodman Games puts out a nice, beefy Original Adventures Reincarnated version. Maybe I’ll even run it in 5e.

  • Cluster-Based Combat

    The following is a procedure for theater of the mind or non-grid based combat with simple, non-defined ranges. It is not limited to fantasy genres.

    Players have two Actions during their turn. They can use one Action to Move from one Cluster to another. (Some games have their own Movement and only one Action; in games like this, use your Move action to move form one Cluster to another. Adjudicate attacks of opportunity if your system has them.)

    You can use your Action to Attack any enemy within the Cluster. Ranged Attacks can hit enemies in other Clusters. However, if an ally is also in the Cluster, Ranged Attacks will have Cover. If your game has multiple cover options, each successive ally in a Cluster ranks Cover up to the next. (For example one ally may provide ½ cover, two allies 2/3 cover, etc.)

    AOE Actions (such as spells, grenades, etc.) affect all participants in a given Cluster. If your game has particularly large AOEs, then it may envelope two or more Clusters, based on the relative size of the AOE and how large the battlefield is.

    The advantage to this is that it’s easier to remember what players are attacking what Monsters in a given Cluster and makes it easier to adjudicate AOEs in theater of the mind.

  • Hit Dice, Hit Points & Weapon Damage

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    I’ve been thinking of doing a little revision to the way my inevitable 2024 revision of what else goes. (There are two alternative versions of this idea, always in motion, the future is: 5e Killer and _&_.) craphack goes.

    I just don’t like the hit dice attached to certain classes in 5e. The grognard in me likes d4 HD wizards. At first I thought I could revise it so there were 3 groups of HD that all made sense together, but unfortunately there are four martials and 5 categories if we use every die, so it’s still a little fucky. Still, here’s the list I came up with:

    image

    So, let’s talk a little bit about what Hit Dice are used for in the game. Primarily they are used to determine your Hit Points. You roll your Hit Dice and add your CON Mod to determine how many Hit Points you get per level.

    My new proposal is that PCs should add their CON Score (so, 13 instead of +1) at level 1, and then never again. So 1st level PCs would be much more survivable, but their HP total would be lower eventually. I haven’t mathed this out yet, but I really want to try it out.

    You also use Hit Dice on a Short Rest to recover lost Hit Points. Perfectly good design, we won’t be altering it here (although we are altering Short Rests–more on that later).

    Finally, I want to propose–I don’t know if I like this yet, but I want to propose–using Hit Dice for your Weapon Damage. Perhaps this will be one of the things that sets _&_ apart from 5e Killer. (Are these two products ever going to coalesce? Probably not.) Hit Dice are badly named in the legacy game and new players come with the expectation that their Hit Dice might actually be the dice they use to hit things. Why not indulge in that? Just make every class do the damage of their Hit Dice when they do weapon attacks.

    This means you can alter the weapons table substantially, because the differences between weapon damage no longer exist. If we were starting from scratch, we could maybe use the weapons table from Wolves Upon The Coast but we aren’t, we’re starting from the table I’ve had for a couple years and recently redid to include WotC’s Weapon Masteries and then my own Martial Options (forthcoming).

    I’m always interested in thoughts about design like this. If you’re interested, feel free to jump on the post, or contact me however you prefer. Stay gold.

  • My Wilderness Hexcrawl Rules

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    Wilderness DM Screen by Greg Rutkowski; from WotC

    This post began life as an attempt to redesign the Ranger for 5e. I’m still going to do that, but it diverted to an explanation of my wilderness hexcrawl procedure, which I don’t believe I’ve ever shared online in full.

    I am on record as saying “exploration” is everything the players do that isn’t talking to people or fighting monsters, but for the sake of this, we’re going to focus on wilderness “exploration” and parts of the game that use that.

    So to do that, we need to talk about what this looks like in my game and at my table. All overland travel in a dangerous area is on a 6 mile hex grid, and we engage in the “gritty realism” rest variant when we use it. This means a short rest is 8 hours overnight, and a long rest is every 7 days/short rests or if the party spends 24 hours within the same hex (which also puts them back on “normal” resting; unless, of course, they travel outside that hex again). Again, this is a “dangerous area,” which is most of the parts of the world that adventure takes place in. If the players are travelling a long distance that isn’t the focus of the adventure (for example, they travel weeks from the city of Dawnharbour to the city of Steelhaven) then that can be handwaved; they’re sticking to roads and not worrying about it, because the Adventure is not The Travel.

    When the party travels through hexes, we determine their planned route and weather. This determines how many hexes they can go through. The party can travel 24 miles per day through normal terrain, which equals 4 hexes; difficult terrain like swamps, deep forest or mountains may reduce this to 3 or even 2 hexes.

    For each hex, the players roll what I call “Advancing d6s.” This means they roll, in order: 1d6, 2d6, 3d6, and finally 4d6. This produces several results, between 1-6, 2-12, 3-18 and finally 4-24. This corresponds with this simple table:

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    The d6 table is landmarks such as burial mounds, obelisks, etc. The d8 table is several encounters that are not necessarily combat related, such as a group of fake adventurers, a Peryton that attempts to capture a player, or a golden Fey steed appearing on the horizon. It also contains an entry called “Character Event,” which is a series of encounters built around the PCs. (I’ll go more into Character Events in a later post.) The d12 table is larger landmarks and mini-dungeons or lairs, including things like wild magic zones, dead magic zones, etc. Finally I have lists of combat encounters. Embphyrkhaksis is the BBEG of the campaign this particular table is taken from; an adult red dragon who can appear any time all four players roll 6s. (For each encounter with Embphyrkhaksis, I raise the threshold for him to abandon the encounter by 10hp; initially they just had to deal 10 damage to the dragon for him to flee, but after 4 or 5 encounters they need to do 40 or 50 damage for him to leave. Exciting!) I then arrange the encounters we rolled into the best narratively cohesive order, based on my judgement as a DM and my absolute, flawless, omniscient knowledge of what is Actually in the hexes ahead of them; I ignore results that are boring or have been used recently if there is a legitimate feature in a hex that I’ve previously determined.

    At a later time, I’ll update this post with a formatted PDF of my table so you can alter it and make your own.

    When the party spends the night in the wilderness, they need to set up watches. My rules assume a 4 person party using 2 hour watches. (Elves can take 2 watches and still gain the benefits of a short rest.) During a watch, they roll 1d6; on a 6, an encounter happens. The character makes a Perception check to see if they notice the encounter; this is contested against a DC equal to a passive stealth check made by the monster. (If there are multiple monsters, I use the monster with the highest bonus.) If they fail, they are Surprised, which can be really dangerous with ¾ of the party still sleeping, outside of their armour. If they pass, the party member has the opportunity to wake up the other players and put on their armour. (Realistically, this takes 10 minutes, but the start of the encounter is a little abstracted in this case.)

    This is the core of my wilderness overland travel system. It’s easy to see, when it’s laid out like this, that there are several “hooks” by which the Ranger can key into to make them feel very useful in this style of campaign.

  • Average Monster Stats for 5e

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    I’m working on a new DM screen, and one thing I decided is that I’d like to have the average stats for each monster type on there, to make improvising monster stats faster and easier if I need to. You could combine this with something like Monster Manual On A Business Card to quickly create a monster; you can use these stats as their saving throws while taking the to-hit and spell save DC from MMoaBC, for example.

    You can also use these with something like MCDM’s Minion rules to quickly come up with minions for your battle. Suddenly need a horde of monstrosities to attack your players, but don’t have time to flip to the Chimera to alter it? Just look at the Monstrosities average stats on your screen!

    Some monster types (like celestials, fey, ooze etc.) lack large representation in the Monster Manual; if someone can provide a spreadsheet with all the available 5e monsters (which probably isn’t strictly legal to distribute), I’d love to update this to be accurate!

    I also have provided only modifiers instead of concrete stats, to save both space and to provide for more ambiguity between individual monsters. IMO it isn’t relevant if the average stat is a 12 or 13, what matters is that both are +1.

    Without further ado:

    Aberration: +2 +2 +2 0 0 0
    Beast: +1 +1 +1 -4 0 -3
    Celestial: +5 +4 +5 +3 +4 +5
    Construct: +2 +1 +2 -2 -1 +2
    Dragon: +6 0 +5 +2 +1 +3
    Elemental: +2 +1 +3 -1 0 0
    Fey: 0 +2 +1 +1 +1 +2
    Fiend: +3 +2 +3 +1 +1 +2
    Giant: +6 0 +4 -1 0 0
    Humanoid: +1 +1 +1 +1 0 +1 0
    Monstrosity: +4 +1 +3 -2 +1 -1
    Ooze: +2 -3 +3 -5 -2 -5
    Plant: 0 -2 +1 -2 -1 -3
    Undead: +1 +2 +2 0 +1 +1

    Hope this helps your game!