Getting my design on...

It has not been decided what system I will run, who will play, or what the campaign will specifically be, but in the new year, there will be Game.

And I am even planning to run it.

I had been putting serious thought into a campaign based on the consequences of adding guns to d&d. Inspired by images like this:

I saw adventurers cutting a path to adventure with both powder and magic of the black variety. Maybe it would be a sandbox game, maybe it would be a game of intrigue and warfare.

In the wilderness one might encounter groups of elite blue-cloaked riflemen, pursuing the elven rebels of the silver skein, a band fighting for freedom or revenge against the brutal and systematic oppression of their kind. I saw adventurers coming into contact with these factions, taking a side, or trying to broker a peace.

It would be powerful, and dramatic, and grim, and bloody, and.. Started to sound like it wouldn't be any fun. I think the story has potential, but as the backdrop of a campaign had the risk of being a series of downers, including a plan I was working up of having a wilderness community that the players would use as a base of operations, forming bonds with the NPCs, becoming involved in their lives, only to find they had been pointlessly slaughtered by one faction for trading with the other. I just didn't want to run it. Maybe in the future I might use it as source material, but I just don't want it now.

So instead I am thinking of something like Stargate meets D&D, but with the players as prospectors rather than soldiers (so more like Fred Pohl's Gateway novels). A hallway of many doors, leading to many adventures. If a player is missing one week then he doesn't step through the door. It could work.

The heart of how I will run this (if I don't decide to do something else) will be similar to Westmarches. The players will have a list of doors, and the initial scouting mission resuts, and they tell me in advance of the game where they will be exploring. I don't know that this will be a 1-20 campaign, but I can run it for as long as it maintains the fun.

The initial scouting mission is a clay golem carrying a cageful of rats. It is instructed to enter the door, stand still and observe for five minutes, then return through the door. If attacked, it should return immediately. Adventurers wishing to explore these various doors are given the information gleaned from this to decide on which doors to try, and prepare as much as possible. The adventurers are considered expendable, no rescue attempt is sent if they do not return.

B@ R@ Golem returned unharmed, saw worked-stone underground passageway - the rats were all asphyxiated. The scouting mission that followed did not return (they carried a bottle of air)

G@ R@ Apparently dwarven construction, golem returned without incident. No exploration yet.

B@ R@ Golem did not return, one enormous mutated rat came back through door an hour later. No exploration yet

B@ R@ Golem saw nothing (apparently magical darkness) rats returned drained of life by negative energy. No exploration yet.

[blogger is stripping the colors out that I am setting. G next to the @ is green, R is red, B is black]

The first @ indicates the result of the golem's exploration, the second @ any human exploration.

When nothing returns, the door is coded double-black and exploration is forbidden.

Not all the doors will be considered level-appropriate for the players - no idea yet how they will react to this concept.

I may post a sample-dungeon based on one of my hooks, to show how it relates to the exploration mission. Things should be hard, but not unfair.

How about another stab at mobile blogging?

Posting on blogspot on my phone seems to work, if I use the right browser, and for a few hundred words. After that the scripting on the page uses up too much memory and my phone closes the browser to resolve the issue, taking my work with it.

So now I am writing this out using Word Mobile, in the hopes that it won't cause me to lose a large draft along with 1d6 san. I can hope, right?

There has not been another Fishy the Ranger session since my last post on the subject. After losing all his money and equipment, another assault on the Caves of Chaos would be suicidal, so I have another plan for the next session. We'll see how it turns out.

My friend and 21-hour dm mr wh40d6.blogspot.com was kind enough to loan me his copy of the D&D boardgame Castle Ravenloft, and I have played a couple games of this with my son - on the second mission we re-picked characters and powers. He went with the Dragonborn fighter (from the Ashardalon game) and I went with the Eladrin wuss, I mean wizard.

It turns out that his plan of taking a character with the highest available AC and HP was sound, I barely got through the final fight alive, and he was ready to bash several more monsters if they had shown up.

I won't try to give a review of these boardgames, firstly because there are a glut of such reviews already online, and secondly because I haven't played very much yet. I will say that I like it, and the 4e system of power cards works well in the context of a boardgame. The suggested age for the game is 12+, but there is nothing excessively graphic or scary in the descriptions, and the complication of the rules means that someone should be old enough to grok the rules, but not everyone has to.

Not sure what the word-count is now, but I am going to wrap this up here. If I can tap out a post or two while I'm on the bus, it becomes far more likely that there will actually be new posts in this space.

Vacation: The RPG

Awhile ago, there was a challenge for a "one-page RPG" leveled, with the assumption being about 1000 words or less. I went over the limit and had intended to go back and trim some, as well as write an adventure for this system. I plan on doing the latter, but I really think this needs more detail, not less, and I don't want to get rid of the flavor text. What do you think?

[edit: By removing formatting and putting the weapon and skill lists in one paragraph, I was able to fit this in one page in word. Also the page count is 1,042, so I wasn't that far off the mark.]

Introduction: You live in the distant future, blissfully freed from the constraints of hunger, want, employment, and education. You do not know cold, or fear. There is a certain degree of boredom. Dinosaur polo came and went, no-one is interested in five-dimensional racquetball anymore, and hyperchess takes too long to play. Clearly the answer to this is a vacation. You really need a vacation.

With the help of a Tour Guide (TG) you will inhabit a puppet, a biomechanical body which can travel into the distant past for the purposes of entertainment. The Tour Guide will choose a time and place that will be fun, exciting, and lethal. Nobody wants to end a vacation without dying.

Character creation:

Skills: As a citizen of the future, you naturally do not possess any skills. Therefore your puppet can be programmed with a selection of skills, including but not limited to

• Ranged weapon
• Melee weapon
• Unarmed
• Vehicle operation
• Crafting
• Healing magic (ask your Tour Guide if he is allowing magic)
• Force manipulation magic (levitate, fly, throw things with your mind)
• Energy projection magic

Consult your Tour Guide before taking a different skill, it may be included in one listed above

Your puppet can be loaded with twelve skill points, to a maximum of four in any given skill.

Equipment: Your puppet can be equipped with items, which will be made of the same biomechanical substance as the puppet. The exact form of these items will be determined by the venue your Tour Guide selects - a laser rifle would be inappropriate in ancient Chicago during the Capone age, and post-apocalyptic, Xag'hos-mutant infested Montana would be an odd place to carry a stone ax. Here are a few examples:

• Ranged weapon, slow (combat bonus is points spent + 4, Initiative 4)
• Ranged weapon, fast (combat bonus is points spent, Initiative 2)
• Melee weapon, slow (combat bonus is points spent +2, initiative 3)
• Melee weapon, fast(combat bonus is points spent -1, Initiative 1)
• Combat armor (armor rating = points spent * 4. Initiative penalty of points spent /2, round down. This is in addition to the native armor rating of 4 for a puppet.
• Hand-held explosive charge (combat bonus of points spent +4, initiative 2)
• Security bypass devices
• Climbing gear
• Implement of healing (points spent *2 in charges, magical or ultra-tech)

You may select up to 10 points of equipment, with a maximum of 4 for each.

As a vacationer, you should be aware of your native talents, such as they are. Here are some possibilities:

• Quick-witted (-1 to initiative)
• Cheater (bring additional 3 points of equipment, may boost equipment to max of 6)
• Skillful (select additional 4 points of skills, may boost skills to a max of 6)
• Dumb luck (may retry any roll where failure would result in failure or death)

Please choose only one.

Basic mechanic: Vacationers will only need two six-sided dice, which they will roll concurrently and add together. To this number will be added relevant skill and equipment bonuses. The result of the roll is a simple pass-fail - if you rolled above the difficulty level of a task, you will succeed. If you do not, you will fail.

Vacationers can always try anything, but if they do not have a relevant skill, they will take a -2 penalty to the roll.

Example difficulties:

• 6 Trivial (why are you rolling?) - hit a large target ten feet away
• 10 Routine - hit the inner ring of a target fifteen feet away
• 16 Challenging - hit the bullseye at at 30 feet
• 20 Improbable - put a bullet through a metal ring to hit a target behind it at fourty feet

The Tour Guide should always ask how a vacationer is approaching a challenge. If they are attempting to leap over a small divide, and they are simply doing a standing jump, it will be higher difficulty than taking a running start and using a pole to vault the distance.

Combat: Vacationers will sometimes have to fight things, whether it is taking on a Sherman tank with a machete or firing a rocket launcher at a small dinosaur.

Combat is divided into rounds. In a given round, vacationers will determine their initiative by what weapon (if any) they are using. Unarmed puppets have an initiative of 1. In each initiative stage, characters move in order of lowest to highest, from 0 to 5. If a vacationer is tied with the Tour Guide, the Tour Guide goes first. If a vacationer is tied with a local, the local goes after.

During their turn, a vacationer may take two actions, which may include movement, attacking, or using an item. A slow melee or ranged weapon takes one action to move, but may only be used once per every two actions taken. A fast weapon may be used for every action, if desired.

The tour guide can choose to handle combat with miniatures (prefer 25mm scale), and if so should assume that five feet of movement is roughly one inch, whether horizontally or diagonally. A vacationer can move thirty feet during one action.

When a vacationer, Tour Guide, or local attacks, they roll the standard two six-sided dice, and add their weapon's combat bonus. If this meets or exceeds the armor rating of their target, they deal one wound. If this exceeds the total by four or more, an additional wound is dealt, and another wound if it is exceeded by 8.

If a vacationer's puppet suffers a total of five unhealed wounds, the puppet "dies", forcing the vacationer to return to his own time, his vacation is over. Other characters may have a higher or lower wound capacity.

Puppets are not subject to poisoning, bleeding to death, disease, or radiation. They are only wounded by physical trauma.

Dungeons & Allies (Fishy the Ranger, Session 3)

Been a bit of a lazy sunday. Got up early with the baby but aside from time with her I didn't really do a lot of home-making today.

In the early afternoon my wife and daughter took a nap, leaving my son and I free to do some gaming.

First we tried out Axis and Allies Miniatures, which I picked up cheap in the "pick our bones clean" sale at Borders. Pretty fun, a bit of complication in learning the combat and movement rules. Beat my son with a point-inferior army (two units of which were pretty useless against his tanks) of a machine-gunner, a mauser, and a panzerfaust, and a panzer 3 (a 13 point tank, undergunned against his russian t34 and his sherman tank, 28 and 24 points)

So with such a deficient force how did I win? Cover and line-of-sight. Made a lot of "cover" rolls to avoid damage, and the panzerfaust's mysteriously unending supply of rockets won the day.

After a couple games, he asked whether Fishy could win versus a panzerfaust. I offered to make the german soldier as a D&D character and equip him out of the modern book, but he preferred to look at the meager attack numbers from A&A, pointing out that the panzerfaust could not hope to defeat his armor class with attack rolls that didn't go above four or five most times, especially as much as the d6s seemed to be hating my attack rolls in the last game. I mean really, if you throw ten six-siders, should not more than two of them give a result of more than three??

We only ran about an hour of D&D after this. Fishy effected an escape which is amazing, in that I am amazed I didn't have to fudge any rolls for him to escape with skin intact.

Fishy awoke on top of a table in the "banquet hall" (room 9 in your classic KoTB if you're curious and have that available) bound hand and feet, with two lazy guards in the room.

The winning strategy for escaping orcs, if you are curious, goes something like this.

1) Address the orcish guards in a random language, such as draconic or halfling.

2) Receive several beatings as you repeat step one, until you are reduced to a fraction of your original hitpoints.

3) Note that the guard, while he was smashing your face in with the non-business end of his sword, has accidentally dropped a small knife on the table next to you.

4) Having freed yourself, address the orc again, requesting he return your equipment. Fortunately the second guard has left temporarily to relieve himself (Legitimately he waited and watched for a moment after cutting his bonds with the knife)

5) Dispatch the orc with the knife, charge into an adjacent room carrying his sword.

6) After a couple rounds of combat with some orcish tribesmen and the other guard, flee through the banquet hall to exit B.

After it became clear the orcish guards were not going to go looking for them in the daylight, Fishy made his way back to the Keep, and tried to hire a patrol he encountered using the money that he didn't have.

Fortunately, his companion Jerin had been released after the first encounter, on his word he would return with ransom money for Fishy. Even more fortunately, Fishy did not go with his original plan after escaping of marching into the orcish cave with his two remaining HP and a small knife, demanding they return his equipment.

How Players View ....

Just a couple meme images I made.

This isn't minecraft.. (Fishy the Ranger, sessions 1 and 2)

Never you mind how the game design project is going. It is my pipe-dream and I will neglect it if I want to..

My sevenling has had a long-standing desire to play D&D, which I finally gave into last month, helping him create a 3.5 ranger(Fishy) and attempting to run the original Keep on the Borderlands. For reasons of (I believe) wanting to encounter some sort of giant sea creature, he insisted on arriving by boat, accompanied by Horsey(a horse).

Knowing that a good DM should always try to accomodate the wants and desires of a player, I had a pair of immature wyverns attack the boat, scaled down to about three hit dice each. One was downed and the other driven off, and Fishy bravely leapt into the sea to rescue a man from drowning (he actually had skill points in swim).

Fishy traveled with the wagon carrying supplies from the small dock to the Keep, at least for a little while before riding off, spoiling a kobold encounter I had planned. He later caught up with the same kobolds and dispatched them, finding a scarf one of the wagoneers had been wearing in the loot.

"He must have been one of the kobolds! Oh wait.. they probably just took it from him."

I am not proud of how I reacted to what happened next. My little seven year-old son started wanting to chop down trees and find metal to bring a forge. I talked him out of it, a little frustrated. "This isn't minecraft, it is D&D. You are supposed to be adventuring, not building..."

Again, it was not a proud moment, and I regretted it very much after the session was over, and planned to find ways to let him do what he wanted to do.. I would give him opportunities to hire craftsmen if he wanted to build a house or a little fort. He had money enough after buying starting equipment to hire some npcs for a few weeks. 50 gold goes a surprising distance in hireling.

The first session ended with him wandering the wilderness with a mercenary named Jerrin.

So we played again yesterday, and I was expecting more desire to dig in, punch trees, build things. I wanted to give him all the agency he wanted.

And apparently what the boy wanted was a fight.

"I move two spaces north to see if I get a fight."

This didn't prompt much but bemusement from his hireling, nor when he started literally beating the bushes for monsters.

He did end up wandering through the large "spider encounter, and failing a fortitude save vs what the module simply called poison. He was excited as this let him use his ranger bonus vs. vermin. He picked vermin as favored enemy. I love that boy sometimes.

Ah, poison. In the version this module was written for, that means "instantly fatal if you fail a save." I guess as I was running three-dot-five, I could have pulled out the monster manual, looked up the entry for Monstrous Spider, Large, and used whatever that was, but the lazy solution was to have it render him unconscious. He got one standard action, and used it trying to change weapons..

I could have left it fatal, and I don't like fudging dice rolls, but I don't want to have to staple this to his character sheet -

Don't know what he thought I meant by "you have only one action, use it well", but I firmly believe that second-guessing everything he does will not help him learn. I really don't like people telling me what to do in a game, and I don't want to do this to my son. Yes, I'm aware that I admitted to doing just that earlier in this post. Like I said, not a proud moment.

This encounter didn't end the session.. A fight with three orcs and a human mercenary did. I will talk about that when I write up the next adventure, whenever that happens.

another month of limited progress

I should really look into.. something.. dunno. make myself post more often.


The game design project rolls on, in my head if nowhere else. I think it's going to stall completely if I don't do some playtesting soon.

The last couple weeks have seen my busrides consumed by Game of Thrones. Don't want to do a review or spoiler. It is good, consider reading it. It is a hard world. At times it is painful to read about. It does not stop being fascinating for a second.


Anyhoo.. finished it last night, and this morning started thinking about the game project. Not going to really take anything from the book, or don't intend to. I do think I'll stick to the standard tolkien fantasy troperriffic races for now. Of course my elves are different. So are my goblins. Was giving them some thought this morning. Nothing on paper, but some definite thoughts going on.