Cephalon Dusp's Archives

 Having tested this method out with my last post on Spell Schools, lets see how breaking down and rebuilding can work on something more central like Ability Scores. A Brief Overview     Ability Scores have been in Dungeons and Dragons since the very beginning, and have been somewhat constant throughout it. Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma are the six basic stats and they have endured. But, they have been a constant source of friction as well.     Originally, Strength, Intelligence, and Wisdom were all Prime Requisites, the things you needed to choose one of the three basic classes (Fighter, Magic-User, or Cleric respectively). The other three were bonus stats that affected your HP, AC, and Number of Followers. These divisions were clear and fairly straightforward, except for the fact that Ability Scores were described as being actual attributes of your character.      Even a brief thought about this will reveal...

    Today, I am about to engage in what I know is bad design, but also hopefully good design. Spell Schools are a method of categorizing spells and they have a long history in D&D. The bad design I will be committing today is that I will not be looking at why  they exist, how  they are integrated, nor what  messing with them will do. I am just going to be messing with them because the way they are now annoys me. The good design for today is that, hopefully, I will make a set of Spell Schools which make more sense. A Brief History     Now, before I really get into tearing apart spell schools and putting them back together, I will take a moment to look back through the history of D&D and their place within it. Originally, in OD&D, there weren't even spell schools, unless one considers the different spell lists of Magic-Users and Clerics different spell lists.. Holmes' Basic and BECMI also do not have spell schools while AD&D 1E finally in...

     I do have a page on useful RPG mechanics, ideas, and concepts on this blog and one of the concepts in there that of Dice Chain and Usage Dice. The central idea is this: Roll a die and if you roll at or below a specific number you drop down the chain. It gives a nice element of random chance to how many uses of something you get and makes tracking items like Arrows or Chalk very easy.     However, it can be very unclear how many uses you would expect  to get when you buy a Ud6 or Ud8 item. I have just gotten done doing some math, specifically using Markov Chains, and I believe my math holds up. Thus I have been able to produce this very handy chart: Usage Die Expected Uses Ud4 2 Ud6 5 Ud8 9 Ud10 14 Ud12 20     Now, that chart is certainly handy and can easily be recreated by noticing that each die adds 1/2 of its size to the number of expected use...

 Forewarning      I would like to make it clear that I have enjoyed playing The Strange   and the group I play with have all enjoyed it as well. We originally started playing it as an alternative to our main 5E campaign since our normal DM was feeling a bit burnt out and we ended up turning it into our main campaign for several months. As we played it, everyone had a character and whoever had anything prepared would step up to run a one-to-few shot.      It was fun and we had a great campaign which we have decided to end for now, but the entirety of this post is going to consist of me basically tearing down this game because it comes so close to being great. As I have come to expect with Monte Cook / Cypher System games, it has poor organization, low-resolution maps, and issues writing rules in a way that makes using them easy. Someday I will write up something about that, but I won't be focusing on that for today's review. Now, lets get started. ...

     One of the things that I want to talk more about on this blog is domain-level play. The problem is, that I don't have a lot (really any) experience running it. I could still write about it, but without actually trying things out it will be nothing but daydreams and regurgitated posts by other people.     Luckily, I am currently running a campaign which will have a focus on domains, war, and wilderness exploration. All of them are cool parts of the OSR, and all of them are parts of the OSR that no one can agree on. With dungeoneering there is something like a standard approach that works very well. Everything else, not so much.     The first several sessions have been about getting my players familiar with the system and helping them to understand a bit more of the world. With that underway, they are now on their way to claim the lost dwarven fortress of Koganusan (aka Boatmurdered), courtesy of a handy magic axe they found with a sort-of-map to th...

    Unfortunately, OSR has a bit of a problem in its dungeoneering rules. As Delta points out in this blog post , the source material for OD&D (Chainmail) used 1 minute turns in 1:1 combat, but a mistake was made moving things over to the new game giving us the 10 minute turn. The two most notable issues this causes is that spells last significantly longer than they were balanced for and that adventurers explore dungeons incredibly slowly (120 ft per 10 minutes is about 0.14 mph).     The naive solution to this is to simply revert back to using 1 minute turns as should have been done originally. While this does solve both of the main problems of the 10 minute turn, it also has the unfortunate side effect of entirely breaking the dungeoneering rules which heavily rely on a 10 minute turn. After all, it would be a little strange to be checking for encounters every 3 minutes and resting for 1 minute out of every 6. Never mind the horrors that result if you were atte...

    Learning more about historical realities can have some surprising applications for RPGs. For example, it is often a semi-intuitive fact that people in the past didn't tend to have secondary/family/last names. In Europe at least, if you needed one you would just go with a profession (John Smith), a physical trait (John Tallman), or even where they lived (John Hill).      That as a fact is a bit overlooked, but doesn't seem unreasonable. I would wager many people would have a moment of realization about hearing about something like that before. In terms of RPGs, this means that for most people, you shouldn't bother coming up with a last name for them. If you need one, go with what pops into your head first.     (On a secondary note, people were sometimes very opposed to the idea  of having a set secondary name, due to how it was perceived as a tool of authority to make taxation, enforcing laws, and so on easier. People didn't lack family names b...

    One of the most common tools people will come across in tabletop RPGs are hex maps. They divide a map into a number of hexagonal sections to ease measuring distances, plotting trips, and filling in new areas. Obviously, this comes with limitations that a plain map does not have and can sometimes pull people out of the fiction that they play in, but hex maps have their uses, even if only for the DM.     The problem with hex maps is that it is normally important to have several maps at different scales, such as one for nearby areas, one for the kingdom, and maybe a world map. Obviously all of these levels need to agree with each-other, but what scales to put them at is a pertinent question.     Unfortunately, it is one that does not have any single satisfactory answer. Still, I will be working to discover what I believe are the best sets of mapping scales for use in the general OSR space.  For those not interested in reading the article and my reason...

       Wow, it has been quite a bit since my last post. My new schedule is pretty hectic and the posts I really want to make are going to take more time than I seem to have, so instead I will write this apparently simple post instead.      I recently came across a post on Delta's D&D Hotspot  that I found very interesting. I will quickly summarize the post for anyone who doesn't feel like reading it (I recommend reading it). In short, the formula OD&D uses for determining if someone hits someone else in combat can be written as: d20 roll + mods >= 20 - level - AC      From there, this can be trivially rearranged for a variety of different systems, including what 5e D&D uses: d20 + level/bonus + mods >= (20 - AC)      In this schema level is replaced with your appropriate bonuses and AC is the hidden THAC0 AC that still sort of underlies the system. (20-AC) is how you convert that THAC0 AC to be the m...

       Well, looks like it has been a bit since I last posted. My schedule is a bit fuller than I had previously anticipated, but I am still unsure if it is because it is so busy or if it is because I have lately been making a strong commitment to staying on top of everything.     Anyway, a retrospective on my most recent little campaign which ended Tuesday! A Brief Overview     I only somewhat recently discovered that the Dishonored series has its own tabletop RPG. I got a digital copy of the book and read through it, discovering that it runs on what is known as the 2d20 system. The core mechanic is that characters (Players and NPCs) both roll 2d20s (or more) and try to roll at or below their target number. Nat 1s are critical successes and count double. The goal is to get a certain number of successes, set by the DM.  Target numbers are created by combining an Action (ie. Fight or Move) and a Style (ie. Forcefully or Quietly). Each of ...

     One of the defining features of OSR games is how they handle gaining experience (XP) and levelling up. XP, which is the tool used to pace character growth, has a an enormous amount of sway in influencing how people interact with the game. Normally, OSR games make the primary source of XP treasure recovered from monsters or dungeons. Actually killing monsters is considered secondary, if it even gives XP at all.      The method of play that this pushes disincentivizes fighting monsters, since it is horribly dangerous and doesn't give great rewards, but also heavy incentivizes diving into dungeons and other locations that would have them because that is where treasure is found.       Compare that with a modern game like 5E, which either does XP by monster or by milestone. The implications of handing out XP primarily/solely based on defeated monster are pretty obvious in what they would incentivize. Milestone progression, however, entir...