Waiting Out Sleep (etc.) Non-Boringly

A good game-runner, tester, designer, stays alert to the signs of boredom around the table. Like the rules that everyone forgets, the experiences that don't lead to fun or meaning need to be identified, diagnosed and dropped.

One non-fun experience in D&D and its ilk is the use of enemy powers that take a player's character effectively out of the game. Who has not succumbed to the touch of a ghoul, the tentacles of a carrion crawler, or the icy grip of a hold person spell?

All these paralytic effects, however, last longer than the typical combat does. (Actually, AD&D never gave durations for monster paralysis, but 2nd edition has ghoul touch lasting 3-8 rounds and carrion crawler paralysis lasting at least 2 turns.) This mean the affected character is warming the bench until the combat ends. Visible boredom results.

Taking paralyzation effects out of the game is not an option for me. They're an important part of the monster arsenal, much more forgiving than save-or-die, but still scary and threatening. One of my players who was concerned that his combat-machine character might be unbalanced received a healthy reminder to the contrary, when in the midst of pitched battle a hold person spell overcame his puny save against mind magic. A relentless press turned into a chaotic retreat, with the other characters having to manhandle the stiff body of the hapless warrior. The stuff of legends!

Why wait ten, twenty, thirty game minutes for the stiff to wake up can be turned into a procedure, a very simple game.

During combat, the player rolls a new saving throw against paralyzation each combat round, keeping track of successes, and also keeping track of rolls of a natural 5 or less.

• A natural 20 means they roll again, keeping only success. 
• A natural 1 means they roll again, keeping only failure.
• After three successes, the paralyzation ends.
• After three 5-or-less rolls, the paralyzation sets in and lasts for 10 minutes.

Taking the character out of danger (by ending or successfully fleeing the combat) means the character is no longer *trying* to wake up, and takes the full 10 minutes. Also, you can rule that each roll to wake up costs the character 1 hit point. This is not terribly unfair; usually attacks that paralyze don't do a lot of damage.

This rule give s a character the potential - if very lucky - to get back into the fight almost immediately. More importantly, it gives hope and something to do in what is otherwise a deadly boring situation.

Improving 52 Pages: Fighter and Rogue Combat Powers

Part of developing the 52 Pages Next, the Expert-like rules extension for my game, involves coming up with alternate powers (feats, whatever) for fighters and rogues as well as what they can do at 5th level. Well, here they are:

It bears repeating my design philosophy here: powers should add effects without adding decisions that slow down play. Most of them are either straight bonuses,consequences on things that happen anyway in combat, or "cool things that happen on this die roll." I find this is vital so as not to slow down the pace of Basic-derived D&D, where the tactical decisions should be less "which power should I use now" and more "how do I position myself and use weapons to best advantage?"

As I prepare for converting my existing Band of Iron players to the very latest version of 52 Pages - they've been playing the 2011 version for some time now - I realize that they've grown very fond of their Whirlwind and Quickshot feats - they really light up when they roll a 5 or 15 for their extra attack, even though these are underpowered compared to my new powers which give you 5 numbers to get an extra attack. So, I souped them up a little and added a couple more.

Yes, Weaponmaster is a little tribute to the old Rules Compendium stuff. I had to think hard on impaling to not create super-ridiculous archers with +d6 damage when ambushing, potential +d6 from Deadshot,and double damage (Runequest style) on top of that. I think the die minimum answer is a nice compromise.

Oh yeah, elves and dwarves now get one feat at level 5.

52 Pages Awesomeness Triage: Rogue (vs. Fighter)

Here's the current version of the rogue class in 52 Pages.

A rogue can shoot OK and fight using Dexterity. Speed save is the specialty, also boosted by high DEX. In skills, which depend on a d6 roll, the rogue starts with +1 in all except Knowledge, gains two instead of one skill points per level, and with a likely high Dexterity will get a further +1 on stealth and acrobatics.

As for the rogue's powers, what sort of combat role are they supposed to encourage? I suppose I would answer that the rogue is supposed to attack from back or side, rather than head on ... to use attacks from distance or from ambush as protection, rather than layers of metal armor ... to excel against a single opponent, rather than hewing through a horde like the fighter ... to be spontaneous and unpredictable instead of solid and reliable.

Looking back at how the rogue has played out (chiefly at the hands of my wife, who runs one in the main campaign), one of the abilities flatly fails at the above goals ... one is rarely used ... and the third works, but tends to lead to rules wrangling, so needs clarification.

Distraction is the one that's rarely used. It's a neat idea but has just too many uses, and is unreliable.

Active Defense is the one that effectively gives the rogue plate mail at mid-levels. Very little is stopping such a character from becoming a front-line bruiser. The rogue should be afraid to get hit, not confident in fancy footwork toe-to-toe.

Ambush is strong, and in character for almost all the desired points - it rewards striking from hiding as well as circling around behind, is no good against an army, and adds an extra unpredictable die of random damage. The only problem is, I haven't been enforcing "from behind" consistently, instead leaving the impression that it works only if the opponent is totally oblivious of the rogue's existence. Another bit of uneasiness came from one incident where the rogue played whack-a-mole, ducking down and scooting around behind a single piece of cover in order to get the bonus repeatedly.

I guess my sense is that these features make the class too strong, in concert with the really high AC bonus. So let's look at the proposed improvement.

Now, you get two powers at each level to the fighter's one to compensate for a lower hit die, lighter weaponry, and slightly worse attack. One is a mobility power and the other a combat power. Steal Away's hit and run is crucial for early-level survival, while Ambush is the basic incentive to sneak and Steal Past. You can't really whack-a-mole any more - but you do get the honest backstab bonus as a reward for maneuvering.

The Opportunity Strike and Exploitation Attack are just versions of the new fighter's bonuses. They key off high numbers rather than low in keeping with the rogue's erratic nature, versus the fighter's reliable nature. They are slightly less useful in that they possibly can lead to overkill or a useless attack.

A Strange Class of People ... The Druids

Thinking it over, there's one more core class I want to add to my system. The Druid. Here's how they fit into the evolving scheme of classes in my game. The bold ones are the core classes, for now, and the others are expansions.

A work in progress...

If I was trying to be super-parsimonious with this scheme, I would put druids as midway between clerics (prophets) and wizards - where witches are. But I see druids as deserving of their own slot. They're alterna-clerics, serving an older religion, more tied to nature. They also use charisma as their prime stat, unlike any other class and further distinguishing them from prophets.

How to make them more than just an outdoorsy Aquaman-type? Give them stuff they can take underground, and things they can do, and hook them up quickly with the primal elements. If they can speak to plants, why not to slime molds?

All right, so here's the basic class with a couple of variants. Basically, they can restore hit points as a cleric does (a kind of morale boost for PCs) but can't use magic to heal actual injuries at 0 hp or less.

And they get nature powers:

 This follows the trend of divine-type powers not being spells, but per-day or at-will in other ways. One principle I maybe need to make more clear is that "speak with plants" is not some all-consuming intelligence spell; although plants have a longer memory than earth, their senses are also restricted to touch. They might tell you someone ate their berries five hours ago or a lot of heavy feet passed by yesterday, but that's about it.

I'm not including these in the 52 Pages of my system just yet (the Basic-level document), but have developed them because one of our elf characters acquired an elf henchman and I was looking for ways to make this wood elf a little different in play. Hence, the powers and the classes.

Next: Two popular class/race-types I didn't put in the diagram and why not.

D&D Next: Two Worlds of Gaming

Slowly through conversations with players I'm getting a feeling for what happened in gaming around 1980 and around 1995, and how the legacies of those watersheds affect people's reactions to game innovations now.

Neither of these dates is exact, but they each represent a middle point of a process of change. There are plenty of intentional throwbacks after, some unintentional look-forwards before. But in general, games have evolved (devolved?) toward:

I have to roll a 6 to get out? What?

Low death, low frustration. Before 1980 or thereabouts frustration was an acceptable part of a game's modeling of life. This was just as true for computer games, as board games, as role-playing. OD&D's 1 hit point characters = Nethack's play-until-character-death = Dungeonquest's brutal, random death at every corner. "Stay in jail" mechanics were OK in board games back then, too (Source of the Nile, Mystic Wood...).

The AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide removed much of death's sting through a "death's door" rule covering survival from zero and negative hit points (not at all evident in the earlier Player's Handbook). Save-or-die poison took longer to go, being finally purged for good in 3rd Edition. Computer games have shown a similar exorcism of frustration, moving from no saving of game state, to save points, to continual saving. State-of-the art design today for many casual games even gives progress for failed attempts, so that eventually the game will be defeated. Time is the commodity here, as always, but the message is "you didn't succeed" not "you failed."

"Activate Mrs. White's Rolling Pin Flurry!"

Character powers for all. This broadly refers to things a character can do distinct from other characters, but more specifically combat moves that can be customized. The move toward this feature in 3rd and 4th editions usually gets blamed on computer gaming, but plenty of computer games in the 1980's and 90's used the standard D&D paradigm, where classes without spells only get to bash, shoot and hack using the standard combat procedure.

The origin of feats and the like in tabletop gaming can probably be traced to the prevalence of special character moves in fighting console games, and to increasing modularity and customization in the gaming world under the influence of collectible card games.

On to the present day.

D&D Next, as much as it draws from the old school, also has strong representation from these two concerns in the system. It's obvious that hit points are numerous, the margin of safety for low-level characters is great, and healing remains as available as in 4th edition. It's also obvious that classes, races, and "paths" each come with an addition to a suite of powers that can leave a 3rd level character looking at 3-5 different combat traits and moves.

And now my confession: My campaign players expect these features to some extent, steeped as they are in MMOs. And so on both counts I have gone about half the way that D&D Next appears to have done. I used a "death & dismemberment" system at 0 hit points or below that is scary, but in practice merciful. Save or die poison is a bridge we haven't had to cross, but I'm inclined to offer multiple saves on poison (one to be seriously incapacitated and one to die.) Meanwhile, class powers and fighting feats in my game are running about half the count of D&D Next, but still give enough of a sense of things to do.

To put it shortly: In order to compete with my homebrew, D&D 5th Edition is going to have to give me the option to cut down on the bones it throws to millennium-era gaming, and let me run a game at my desired level of "old world charm and new world convenience."

One Page Class Powers: Fighter Feats from Damage Dice

As I've mentioned before, I like the idea of the DCC-RPG's Mighty Deeds of Arms but think their extra dice rolling and table looking-up will slow down combat rather than juicing it up excitingly.

My goal was to design a feats system that proceeded more or less automatically from what the fighter was already doing. True to my vision of the class, the fighter, unlike the rogue, shouldn't need to think as much. He wades into combat with a few minimal tactical precautions and the normal dice rolls do the work.

The second insight was to reduce the table weight (and page space) by using tables I was already using: my critical hit and fumble tables.

The follow-through power, as I note, is not original, but it's classic and it balances the "unhinge the big guy" of the feats with "plow through the little guys."

A caution, though: these rules work best with some other assumptions I make in house-rules, such as that light weapons don't get full super-exceptional Strength bonuses (otherwise dagger + 18 STR = super punch up machine), and that "smashing and bashing" weapons like axes and maces have damage scores in the form d6+1 (for example) while swords and spears have damage scores in the form d8 (for example). This makes the smashers more likely to score Force feats and the slashers more likely to score Finesse feats.

The only extra dice roll is the save, but I felt that was only fair to avoid fighters pushing around much tougher enemies. In a pinch you can say that they only work on a successful hit and forget the save. Does that appeal? Yea or nay ...

One Page Class Powers: Rogue

The rogue is not just supposed to be a troubleshooting thief filing his nails until the next 13% chance to detect traps, but a light fighter, a real ranger (not the spell-slinging ridiculoid beastmaster 2d8 munchkin thing from AD&D), a swashbuckling fop, and others of that ilk. These powers are all combat, encouraging use of terrain and positioning, built off the need to survive and run in encounters while scouting ahead, and incidentally work best against a lone opponent. Oh yes, and a rogue is really good at the old thiefly adventuring skills, including noticing detail and mechanics.

(D&D Murphy's Rule #57864: elves are only good at noticing secret doors vertically in walls, not mechanically identical secret pressure plates in floors, which count as a trap. And what if the trap is a secret panel in the wall ... is it a door or a trap?)

As I mentioned a while ago, I think each of the classes in D&D is best served by mechanics that emphasize the different styles of their players.

Fighter: unlimited use powers that require little strategy.
Rogue: unlimited use powers that require strategy.
Priest: limited use powers that require little strategy.
Wizard: limited use powers that require strategy.

That's the template I've followed here, anyway.

One Page Class Powers: Priest

We're on to the class powers: the big four, then dwarves and elves on one page, and a one-page consolation gnome class (he'll be a little thin so I might pad it out with a table of magical screwiness). This one I'm presenting first because it's the least original, and I mean that as an homage to Talysman's no-spells cleric idea, which I discussed and modified previously here.

I'm only detailing levels 1-5, but at level 7 you get cure poison, and level 9 you get raise dead, with suitable limits. Turning is smoothed out from how it usually appears: you can't blast skeletons into dust, but you can make orcs sweat a little from the back rank.