RPGaDay 2019: 14 Guide

This is a good product. Smart design.

The newest iteration of Dungeons & Dragons now includes rules for sidekicks. 

These are three simplified archetypes, the warrior (fighter), the expert (rogue), and the spell caster. These simplified character classes are easy to play, easy to follow, and do the workman’s job of propping up a narrative conceit. It’s good. Well, it’s fine. Okay.

I do it a little differently, and have for years. You still get to the same place, but there’s more variety and also some player agency. When the adventurers embark on their epic mission, they get a zero-level character. He’s got regular stats, four hit points, and one proficiency—usually the thing he can do.

That zero-level character joins the party, and works and behaves as normal. Typically that means he's the guide into the mountains or the cook or the stable boy, or whatever. He gets 1 X.P. each week that he stays alive. If he mixes it up or swings a sword or almost drowns but is saved by a party member, he gets 2 X.P.

At 25, the zero-level character becomes a first level…well, it depends on how the traveling is going. Are the players actively keeping the NPC alive? Who’s doing most of the protecting? Who does the NPC not like, and why. Using the existing character classes in the party, and looking at the adventures the NPC has participated in, I make a small list and randomly roll for it to see what the NPC will become.

And what’s interesting about that in a meta-game sort of way is this: you can create the new NPC’s background whole cloth out of the adventures your party has already been having. This really makes the character feel real and also ensures that he’s not left behind by the other players.

In the last game I ran, the cartographer’s guild hired the gang to clear out the cursed forest, and map the area and look for trade routes as you go. They were to be paid by the miles covered.

None of my miscreants had anything resembling mapmaking or wilderness survival skills so the cartographer’s guild sent a gifted apprentice along to help with the mapmaking. It was made abundantly clear that no harm was to befall the mapmaker, or they would not get paid.

With the motive and incentive clearly established, I sent them into the woods. Every week that Paidric the mapmakers stayed alive, he got one experience point. If he was in danger but escaped harm, he got two experience points. Their battle plans soon included a “where’s Paidraic” component. Would they squirrel him away from the fight, or just keep him in the back of the group?

When he finally racked up his 25 points, I did some calculating as to what he’d likely decide to be and it was pretty obvious that he needed to be a cleric of knowledge. So Paidraic the mapper became Paidraic the learned.  Mind you, by this time he was two levels below the player characters, and that was okay. He still mapped, and also healed, and helped them with puzzles when they got stuck.

It occurs to me that I could still utilize this system, and then transition over into a Sidekick instead of a fully realized character sheet. And that’s just what I am gonna do.

RPGaDay 2019: 9 Critical

It’s impossible for me to associate anything other than grievous bodily damage to the word “critical.” In the cutthroat 1980s, there was no shortage of bloodletting. Critical hit tables proliferated and they were all designed to reward people with an instant, gory kill (or death, depending on which way the dice were rolling).

I never used them in my games, not because I didn't want to, but because no one ever wanted to play the one character class who could offset critical hit tables; the cleric. That was just NOT our group. The few times one player's character got close to death was always an area of great trauma, so I didn't feel like piling on.

Now? Nuke 'em from space. It's the only way to be sure. 

Clerics are strong, so strong, and they throw divine energy around like a toddler flings Cheerio's. Despite all of the ancillary fun stuff that clerics can do, they still have a primary purpose and that is to keep the party alive and intact. 

On the other hand...you can sometimes come off as churlish if you take delight in injuring and scarring player characters. I do think there is a middle ground, though; a place where you can make the critical hit more serious and something that has to be dealt with, but not so catastrophic (well, mostly) that there's no bouncing back. 

Here's a set of Critical Hit rules for your perusal. They are free to use if you are so inclined. Feel free to comment if you like. I wanted something that took no more than 3d6 to implement, and would be easy for a player to keep up with. I think this works well. If you try it, I'd love to hear some feedback.

Alternate Critical Hit System for 5e

RPGaDay 2019: 8 Obscure

As a first generation gamer, I didn’t know how good I had it. Especially since I didn’t have ready access to Lake Geneva, WI, or GenCon, or even the means to do that if I were so inclined. Later, in my late teens, I finally went to a convention by just, you know, going. But in the early 1980s, there wasn’t a map for me to follow. There were two areas of the gaming world; over there, where all of the good stuff was happening; and right here, in Abilene, Texas, which was the middle of By God Nowhere.

AND YET…

There was something weird about Abilene. I don’t know what it was; there were three colleges and an air force base, so some things make sense, like having several hobby shops in a town of 100k (more on this later). But in a cow town in West Texas, hours away from Austin and the Metroplex, I got a hell of a pop cultural education, the likes of which I didn’t grasp until I was an adult.

A quick example: back in the 1970s, there were three channels on your TV: ABC, CBS, and NBC, all broadcast from local TV station (sometimes paired with a radio station, thanks to Ladybird Johnson). If you lived in a large metropolitan area like Houston or Dallas, you got access to a PBS station, as well. There was also some broadcasting found on the UHF channel, but only if your local stations had a transformer.

Abilene didn’t have a transformer. What it DID have was this: we got the three stations in town, ABC, CBS, and NBC, but we ALSO got WFAA, an ABC affiliate out of Dallas. We also got KTVT, channel 11, out of DFW and channel 13, KERA from the metroplex as well.  I had seven channels to choose from as a kid—and while the two ABC channels had the same prime time content, the afternoon and weekend fare on WFAA was ten times better. They played Going Ape week in the summer; All five Planet of the Apes movies, in order. And channel 11 showed all of the Universal monster movies, and the Harryhausen films, and late night horror and SF movies on the weekends. On Sunday night, I could watch Star Trek in syndication and then change over to Dr. Who late night on KERA.

Better than average artwork!
Pinch me, I'm dreaming!

I told you that to tell you this: I had three full-fledged sources for my D&D materials and an underground fourth that still has me shaking my head to this day. We had a Waldonbooks and a B.Daltons in the Mall of Abilene, located at opposite ends of the mall. I got a lot of exercise going between the two. There was also a hobby shop in the other, old people mall, called The Hobby Shop. It was one of three, the other two being a train and a plane store, respectively. This shop was a catch-all, and its wares included plastic models (which I was into, of course), like the Star Wars space ships, and the reason I mention this at all: A whole magazine rack dedicated to all things D&D.

And back then, that meant a bunch—as in, a cornucopia—of small press offerings. This hobby shop is long gone now, but they got a lot of my money back in the day; I bought my first set of dice from that place, and I bought nearly all of my Dragon magazines there. The store stocked TSR products, of course, but they also carried modules and accessories by other publishers; Judges Guild, Gamelords, Flying Buffalo, and the like. There was also a trio of books from Bard Games: The Compleat Spell Caster, The Compleat Adventurer, and The Compleat Alchemist.

Yeah, I never heard of them, either. They DID advertise in Dragon, but I’d already committed by the time I saw their ads. There was something about The Compleat Alchemist that spoke to me. Not sure why. But I had to have it when I saw it, so home it went with me. This was my first time off the reservation, if you catch my drift. I’d never bought a Non-TSR product before.  It felt kinda like I was cheating, but at the same time, there was a real sense of freedom in knowing I wasn’t bound to just one company’s creative output.

This book was one of the first things that really opened my mind up to the possibilities inherent in the game; using some of the things in The Compleat Alchemist made my game a little more unique, a little different. And it made me sort of say, “What else can I do to make my game more interesting?”

I also bought The Compleat Adventurer, but it wasn’t as interesting to me. It was a slew of new character classes, many of whom I’d seen a version of here or there in Dragon or elsewhere. But The Compleat Alchemist was gonzo. It used every single element of historical alchemy and then some. If I’d implemented this as a character class, it would have been the most powerful thing in the game. Seriously. Player character alchemists could make golems and clockwork monsters, as well as craft potions, poisons, powders, and other compounds that did all kinds of wacky things.

Despite my lack of use, the Bard Games books were pretty inspirational to me. They were eventually reworked into a D&D clone set in Atlantis. But those original books were game-changers for me. However, there was another influence on my D&D game that was even closer to home: Dragon Tree Press.

If you know them at all, you probably know them through their association with David Hargrave and his infamous Arduin campaign setting. But when they weren’t publishing those every versions of Arduin, they had their own modest line of system neutral spells, traps and tricks, artifacts, etc. These little thought experiments were statted out in general terms and they were lethal, interesting, dangerous, and strange, in that order. The publishers of Dragon Tree Press, Ben and Mary Ezzell, published their home-grown chapbooks and sold them at the used bookstore they also ran—in Abilene, Texas.

Their bookstore, Kingston Paperback Exchange, was one of my favorite haunts as a young man. It’s where I bought the first Thieves’ World anthology, where I bought my first Tarzan paperback, and where I bought my first silver age collector’s comic. They also had a spinner rack at the front counter that was their entire game line.

I remember Ben; he was an engineer of some kind, or at least, he dressed like one, with short button down shirts, pocket protector, you get the idea. He also had shoulder-length black hair and a full beard and mustache, neatly unkempt under black horn-rimmed glasses. He knew stuff; he had a computer at the book store that he played Starfleet Battle simulations on, along with Sargon Chess, of course. He also had good book recommendations. But I never quite put it together that he was the guy who published and wrote all of that other cool stuff.

Reviewing Strongholds & Followers

 I have been a little busy with real world stuff these past couple of months—the kind of things that are health-related—and so I have not been as active on the blog as I would like. Sorry about that. But I am still working, writing, and thinking about gaming and Dungeons & Dragons in particular. To that end, I will point you to Matt Colville’s YouTube channel, because he eats, sleeps, and breathes this stuff and I find myself in agreement with him, like, 98% of the time, when it comes to running D&D games. This is very likely because we are about the same age and have experienced many of the same things, and also we have very similar tastes regarding First Edition Stuff (such as Appendix N) and how we use it in gaming.

Colville is also very sincere and genuine in his discussions (really a monograph) of running and playing D&D. It shows, and it’s one of the things that makes him so likeable. It almost makes me forgive him for mispronouncing “archetype” every single time he says it.

Playing Games, Part 8: Just When I Thought I Was Out...

Nobody does Pacino from Godfather 3. They all do
Silvio doing Pacino from Godfather 3. 

Several years ago, I was employed by a homeschooling family as their creative arts teacher for one of their kids; a smart, funny, creative young man who was a little shy and needed help with his verbal and language skills. When he was younger, I was initially reading comics with him, which we both got a kick out of. Now that he was older now, he was into video games and Skyrim and all of that stuff. So, I thought, let’s kill a few birds with one stone and try Dungeons and Dragons first edition. He really took to it, and I re-discovered, I did, too.

Late to the Party

Crime? In my city?

I realize what I am doing here is all the rage, if we were in 2010. Be that as it may, I didn't get pulled back into gaming until 2015 or so, at the end of the fourth edition of D&D, and so I was at ground zero for the launch of 5th edition. I think that managed to kill most of the OSR blogs out there, like a weirdly configured EMP. But there were a few of them that morphed (or mutated, if you prefer a more Gamma World-esque metaphor) into writing about fifth edition content and homebrew rules and converting first edition shenanigans into fifth edition systems.