Simple-ish Grappling Rules for D&D

So, like, grappling:

1. You must Close to Grapple, which is a combat stunt like the Simple Combat Maneuvers listed here. I envision something like Escrima Stick Grappling, so if you aren't armed with  a 1-handed weapon, your intended target gets a free counter-attack against you. A successful counter-attack spoils the Close attempt.
2. Upon a successful Close, you roll your Hit Dice plus the better of your DEX bonus or STR bonus, if any; your target does the same.
3. If your total is higher, you have successfully Grappled the enemy. They may not move and have a 4-point AC penalty. You may drag the enemy 5 feet per round (more, or less, at the GM's option) if you wish.
4. If their total is higher, the Hold is Broken and they may push you back, or initiate a  grapple on you, without needing to Close to Grapple and without allowing you a free attack.
5. 3 successive Grapples on a combatant in a row indicates a Choke-Out, and they are unconscious for 1d6 rounds. That is, you must succeed on a Grapple, then continue succeeding without the Hold being Broken at any point. If it is, start over.

Possible considerations:

• The opponent must be grapplable: no slimes, dragons, or beholders.
• Sure, you could Grapple a skeleton or an iron golem, but you can't choke it out.
• Opponents with high hit dice (say, in multiples of 3) may take longer to choke out, so a 4 HD fighter takes four grapples and a 7 HD fighter takes five.
• Multiple assailants can dog-pile a single opponent; each assailant may add their Hit Dice to the next successive Grapple roll. They must still Close to Attack, but they don't suffer free attacks against them, and the target still has the aforementioned 4-point AC penalty.

cheers,
Adam

Because I Could

The OSR game for my Pathfinder crew went well. Since it was a one-shot, I just created characters for them (a process which took < 1 hour for all three) and had them visit (yet another) ancient temple in search of the legendary statue of...y'know, it was just a one-shot.

I had intended to use the night as a showcase for combat tactics, giving them a ruined overground area with rubble, walls, and a couple of hollowed-out buildings so they could play with setting their own traps, exploiting cover, utilizing verticals, and the like. There wasn't so much of that, but there was some old-school dungeon crawling in the secret underground chambers. Since there was no "spot" check, but there were obvious traps, the players were going slow, asking relevant questions ("what do the tiles look like?" and "how many holes are there in the wall?") and making smart decisions ("I can cast Protection from Normal Missiles and set the dart trap off"). Chief among these was the use of the Cloak of the Mountebank to steal the idol and disappear before the ethereal Chimera could materialize and attack, although D., the rogue's player, decided to taunt it before disappearing and lost a dozen hit points from claw/claw/bite for it.

Feedback was positive, especially from the two who'd played 1st and 2nd edition D&D before, but even the one who'd only played 3.0 and later enjoyed it; the general opinion was that they'd felt more immersed because they were really looking at things. A question came up on reddit about how to increase immersion, and (though I didn't post to it), the answer was clear to me: don't have Spot/Sense/Notice checks, but let the players ask about the world around them.

So, it was a good night for showcasing what the old-school does well, and my players like it, but I still want to run a good mass combat one of these days. Fortunately, they've given me the go-ahead to try some more, so I will get the chance to one of these days soon.

cheers,
Adam

Because I Can

I'm going to run an OSR-style game for a group I usually GM Pathfinder for tomorrow. I'm pumped. Since it's a one-shot, I'm going to have less context than usual. As a result, I'm going to make it a display of the things you can do in an old-school style, which is, in my humble opinion, everything you can do in the new-school. In particular, I'm going to single out something that gets a lot of attention as being a strength of 4e: exploitation of terrain features.

I think I'll have the opportunity for chase or combat in an abandoned, multi-storey temple of some sort; I want to exploit the verticals. And I'll have some rubble to create rough terrain, and perhaps have the whole outdoor part take place while it's raining, so smooth surfaces become slippery and soil becomes mud. It'll be an opportunity for players to find and exploit cover and partial shelter, to try to funnel enemies into single-file formations, that sort of thing.

cheers,
Adam

Sounds Like Fun (But I'm Still Not Sold)

I got a call from my best friend over the weekend, on his new phone. Like me, he is returning to gaming after a long hiatus, and having a fun time of it. Unlike me, he is playing 4e. He said he liked how streamlined the rules had become (ascending AC, unified d20 mechanic, et al), but I pointed out that a lot of that streamlining took place in 3.x. I gave him my stock 4e spiel, that I don't dislike it as a game in and of itself, I just feel it's strayed too far from the feel of the original game to call itself Dungeons & Dragons. For him, though, it fixed a lot of things that he'd been struggling against in the mid-80's; in particular, he liked the simplicity of rolling a d20 to hit a target #, versus the hodge-podge of roll-over or roll-under d6, d20, and percentile rolls from 1st edition. Fair enough, said I.

Then we got to the good stuff: the game recap.

I don't recall much of what he said, other than that the game ended when they were in a room where zombie minions were crawling out of a trapdoor in the floor; it was meant to be a bombastic set-piece to top off the night, but that ended quickly when the mage of the group (or one of them) got to the trapdoor and started blasting the z-words with some at-will damaging power. Since they were crawling out one-by-one, and since "minion" types only have one hit point, she could simply smack them down almost at her leisure as they sprung up. After that, the DM basically said "okay, you've gotten through all I had planned for tonight."

Since I don't know what at-will power she used, I couldn't comment on whether or not the zombies should have had a saving throw, but I pointed out that if they did, then the plan wasn't so airtight: in 4e, even though minions have only one hp, if they save in a situation that would ordinarily mean taking half damage, they take no damage instead. "See," I told him, "I do know the rules to 4th edition."

This, however, was not the game recap to sell me on the idea of playing it. For one thing, as I've mentioned before, I like Vancian magic, and "at-will" powers run completely contrary to that aesthetic. And even if you do have such casual thaumaturgy, I don't like the idea that it could be damage-inflicting magic. Of course, it could just be that the DM didn't think the encounter through enough, as we are all wont not to do sometimes. If he'd had multiple trapdoors, it wouldn't have formed a bottleneck like that, and if he'd thrown non-minions in the mix, the mage couldn't have simply defended it by playing magical whack-a-mole. But I can't help but think that the endless supply of damage spells--even low-damage spells--sucked all the challenge, and therefore most of the fun, out of that particular encounter.

Still, it did have one element that unites it to my preferred style of play: by making a clever assessment of the situation, the players were able to take advantage of circumstances and turn them to their favor.

And that's what makes these games fun in the first place.

cheers,
Adam

Tunnels and Trolls: optional archery changes

Speaking of "swingy", I've also house-ruled the archery rules for Tunnels and Trolls a little bit.

My archery/missile rules include an 'easier' table:

1-30 ft: L1-SR on DX
30-100 ft: L2-SR
100-200 ft: L3-SR
200-300 ft: L4-SR
300-500 ft: L5-SR

...plus or minus 1-2 levels for very large or very small targets.

The archer makes the roll and notes by how much he has exceeded the target. So if I needed a 5 and rolled 11, I'd note the 6-point spread. If the target is a sentient, moving creature, it gets a L1-SR, but has a penalty to the roll equal to the amount the archer exceeded, in this case 6 points. So if I had only needed to roll a 4 or better, I would now need to roll a 10 or better. (If two characters are shooting, optionally it would take a L2-SR beat by the sum of the two successes, but only one of the arrows actually hits--you dodge one only to walk into the other.) This (a) allows archers at low levels a decent chance to hit non-moving targets, and (b) allows characters a chance, however slight, to avoid the considerable damage that even a low-level archer can inflict.

As always, these are just my house-ruled suggestions. It is very possible to enjoy T&T playing by the rules as written.

cheers,
Adam

Tunnels and Trolls: Making Spells less "Swingy"

"Swingy" is a term some gamers use for a rule or a system that can make conflicts go all the way for one side or all the way for the other, based on a die roll or some other consideration. Notably, swingy systems don't allow the players much opportunity to influence the outcome once it's known which side is winning, and often don't allow an opportunity to prevent or influence it beforehand without some kind of GM fiat.

Case in point is Tunnels and Trolls' combat spell Take That You Fiend. It does the caster's INT stat worth of damage directly to the opponents CON/Monster Rating, disregarding armor. And though the spell description states that "...it is a singular spell and must be directed at a single foe", it also has a disruptive side-effect that adds to the caster's party's combat total. It can't do double damage, but it can pad the numbers so you don't take any. Other spells, like Hellbomb Burst, simply destroy everything in their range. But at least it's a higher-level spell.

Some in-game rules will negate this, such as possessing a weapon made of meteoric iron, which cancels 3rd level and lower spells. But even then, a higher-level wizard can just cast a 4th-level Take That You Fiend. The 7th edition also introduced a new attribute called Wizardry, which is a rating of your character's affinity for magic; spells cast on a character by a wizard with a lower Wizardry rating simply do not take effect, which is why even non-spell-casting characters would want to boost that stat.

As you can see, very "swingy".

In light of this, I propose a new rule for games where the GM and players wish to moderate the power of combat spells: after having a damaging spell cast on a character, the player can roll a SR (Saving Roll, based on Luck or another of the character's stats); the difficulty level is the level of the spell caster. For every point over what is needed for success, reduce the damage by one point. The "minimum roll" applies for success or failure, but not for the amount calculated.

If that last bit sounds confusing, consider that T&T requires a minimum roll of 5 (on 2d6), regardless of the attribute or SR level. A 2nd-level SR, for instance, requires a total of 25 points (attribute plus roll); so if Len the Lucky (with a Luck of 23) needs to make a 2nd-level roll, he'd only need two points on two dice--but there's always a minimum of five needed. If he rolls, say, a nine in this scenario, he'd subtract seven points, not four. Failing the roll wouldn't help him at all, though.

Alternately, you can let the magic system work as-is in most cases, but in any case where the spell would kill  your character, you get to make the SR and keep as many  points of CON as you made the roll by.

This alone is probably not enough to ease the "all-or-nothing" feeling of some T&T magic. It's possible that some spells (like the aforementioned Hellbomb Burst) need to be rewritten or discarded for this style of play. (Please take note of that last clause: if you like T&T's magic as-is, I'm not saying your fun is Wrong and Bad. I just like my wizards to have less of a combat role, because that's where I like warriors to shine.) I'll delve into that a bit more in future posts.

cheers,
Adam

Abstractions

If combat is broken off, the fleeing party must accept an attack without any return on his part, the attacker adding +2 on his die roll for hit probability, and the armor class of the fleeing party can not include a shield. (J. Eric Holmes on what would later become known as the Attack of Opportunity, Dungeons & Dragons, p.21)

One of the common criticisms of OD&D is that the combat system isn't realistic, and the common rejoinder to that is that D&D combat is abstract.

That's a perfectly good reply, too, in my opinion, and it reflects D&D's roots in earlier games like Chainmail and other wargames. In those, pieces often represented units of 100 men or more, and the attack/damage resolution was necessarily an abstraction, due to the aggregate nature of the unit. D&D simply evolved from that perfectly adequate system by dividing 100 men by 100, giving us the abstractions of Armor Class and Hit Points.

Nonetheless, there is abstract and there is Abstract. We don't talk about Triangle units hitting Squares and knocking off three points from the Blue Column; it's swords and axes hitting goblins and manticores and knocking their h.p. down. And dividing up an aggregation to derive the individual suffers from the "average family" problem, where every household has 2.73 children. So even in the early days, there was some desire to add a little bit of verisimilitude to combat, as evinced by the quote above.

Of course, combat was never the sole activity in the game, nor even the central one, despite what some might say, so it makes sense that it be dealt with on a level that reflects how much time and effort it should occupy. But weighed against this is the reality that in combat, more than any part of the game except maybe traps, your character can go down due to a bad die roll, and that giving the players more fiddly bits to twiddle can give them a feeling of control and fairness even when their hero meets an untimely end.

I mention all of this because I like Armor Class and Hit Points for the abstractions they are, but for me, the right level of detail is a moving target, and I sometimes find myself wanting more. I'm not thrilled by how complicated the rules have become on that score, however. I prefer my tactical flash to be as simple as possible, but no simpler. Something like this is a good start; a collection of easy-to-state and easy-to-adjudicate rules. Although I don't agree with all of them, this kind of thinking seems more elegant than all of the cumulative bonuses and multiple attack feats of later editions. So I'll be asking about this kind of thing in the future, and offering some suggestions of my own from time to time. I hope you'll find them useful.

cheers,
Adam