Rethinking Weapon Damage

Using average weapon damage instead of rolling speeds up the game. I've been doing it in Roll20 because the system doesn't automatically roll the damage (at least I haven't found the correct setting yet) but this is unsatisfactory.

I've always felt that the hit roll and weapon damage should be linked. A really good hit should do more damage and a barely successful hit should less damage, so here is what I'm thinking. This applies to the raw roll without any modifiers and only when the roll is a hit of course.

    20         A critical, double damage

    15-19    Maximum damage

    10-14    Average damage

    05-09    Minimum damage 

For example: 

Thug's mace: Max is 8, Ave is 5, Min is 3. Easy enough.

Thug's Heavy Crossbow: Max is 10, Ave is 5, Min is 1.

Since Roll20 automatically calculates weapon damage for the players this will only be done for the foes but I think it should work.

My only question is would the critical be double the max damage or double the average? I'll have to think about that.

Lost Mines and Dragons of Icespire Peak

So I rolled our Lost Mines of Phandelin campaign into Dragons of Icespire Peak. Some players had wanted to buy up a house in Phandelin and make a base of operations but others didn't. Some thoughts so far:

• Phandelin should be walled with a small keep like the Keep on the Borderlands and every building in Phandelin should have been mapped with a table of who is inside during AM and PM.
• Town needs a wandering encounters table for the streets. Something quick and easy but currently there is nothing and this is an intro to the game so why not?
• The townsfolk should have been introduced better. Perhaps in the Inn where everyone knows your name they have a table that lists who is in there in the AM, and who is there in the PM.
• The Miners Exchange should be a building built over an actual mine. This would justify the town being there and makes the town a target for greedy villains. Also miners unearthing something could provide an adventure.
• The rumors should be introduced better. The game needs carousing rules with rumors added. The Innkeeper should be the source of most rumors. The message board used in Icespire Peek is gamey and stupid. 
• Phandelin should have a proper temple with encouragement for PC Clerics to either be connected to or in conflict with that temple.
• The campaign should have ended with a list of further adventures for the New PC to create in Phandelin. Orcs attack the town walls, Orcs get in and attack a specific building. The locals are hostile to that temple, or the temple has been taken over by a different faction within the greater cult and is no longer friendly.
• So far the bigger adventures have been decent and the short ones have been lame. Hopefully Icespire Peak gets better, online reviews seem mostly positive but reading ahead I have my doubts.

Crowscroft - One Page Dungeon Entry

Thought I'd give the one page dungeon contest a go. I'm pretty happy with it, even it is more of a setting than a dungeon. In case it isn't clear the name is a play on Ravenloft. Crowundercroft seemed too obvious so I chopped the name a bit. Fingers crossed. 

Some Thoughts on the Lost Mines of Phandelver

First a minor nit, the names Phandelver and Phandalin are too similar. Also Phandalin is a village on the frontier with tribes of goblins and bugbears around and it has no defenses, no militia, nothing. It's a miracle it hasn't been wiped out yet. I would expect a ditch and wooden palisade at the very least if not a stone wall surrounding the place. 

Second, the maps. Cragma Caves reminded me a lot of the map in Murria's Revenge in the old Runequest Borderlands box. It's a good map and the similarities might be accidental. In fact most of the changes are improvements, still you start on the left side of the stream and circle around and cross to the right. Weird coincidence. 

The map of Cragma Castle was nice as well, My players enjoyed the tactical nature of it, even if the designer has apparently never actually seen a castle before. I didn't like the Wave Echo map at first, visually its pretty bog-standard, but in play it worked nice as my players were trying to circle around the enemies and take advantage of the looping nature of the place. It needed more verticals but it was nicely designed. Just goes to show you can't judge a map entirely on the appears. Lastly the Orc mission needs a battlemap. Luckily pretty much any map you could dream of is online somewhere.

Third, I like the way they aimed for a sandbox but the pacing was odd. Maybe I misread something but it felt like there is a bit of hurry to save the missing dwarf brothers, but you aren't really high enough level so first right away, so you do a side-quests or two to level-up before hand. Very video-gamey and artificial. It would have been better if it started in Phandelin against ruffians, then side-quests and sandbox fun, and on one of those the party is Ambushed > Cragma dungeon > Cragma Castle > Wave Echo cave for the win.

Lastly the module missed a chance to explain how to run urban adventures in Phandelin.  They needed details on how to handle encounters, how to dole out rumors, maybe an encounter table. Instead they just list out the important buildings and leave it all up to the DM. They leave you the feeling that the players need to go door to door knocking and asking questions for quest hooks which is silly. They should have had carousing rules of some sort. Not the kind used throughout the OSR for XP, but some fun tables to handle the celebration that was likely to spring-up when the players took out the Redbrand Ruffians. Tables that helped introduce NPC and dole out scenario hooks. 

So it was a good module for my parties intro to 5E and re-intro to RPG after a couple of decades. 

To Death Save or not to Death Save, that is the question

When I read about the Death Saves I didn't like it. It seemed characters would be impossible to kill, which seemed unrealistic, and the threat of death is a big part of low-level play I like. Then we had a character go down in the middle of battle, the Cleric of all people, and were were mostly playing rules as written, so I looked up the rule:

Death Saving Throws
Whenever you start your turn with 0 hit points, you must make a special saving throw, called a death saving throw, to determine whether you creep closer to death or hang onto life. Unlike other saving throws, this one isn’t tied to any ability score. You are in the hands of fate now, aided only by spells and features that improve your chances of succeeding on a saving throw.

Roll a d20. If the roll is 10 or higher, you succeed. Otherwise, you fail. A success or failure has no effect by itself. On your third success, you become stable (see below). On your third failure, you die. The successes and failures don't need to be consecutive; keep track of both until you collect three of a kind. The number of both is reset to zero when you regain any hit points or become stable.

He failed two times, and on the third round the Bard healed him making a third roll unnecessary. It felt like a cheat. The guy was dead, but those are the rules so I let him live to fight another day.

Then later I talked to the Colonel and the Death Saves came up. It wasn't his character that went down but I don't think that would have changed his opinion. He really liked the way it worked. He fought in Iraq and said you had guys go down and you had a certain amount of time to treat them or they were gonna die. That meant one of their fellows had to stop fighting and help the injured person if a medic wasn't immediately available. Suddenly the combat had two less guns which could be very bad. They would stabilize the injured and send them off to a M*A*S*H unit to get proper attention later. Anyway he felt the game modeled the tactical situation pretty well, so I've been rethinking my dislike of the Death Saves as my life of technical writing has not really put me into a lot of combat situations but it has taught me to trust subject matter experts.

The one catch to all this is it makes a total party kill a bit more likely as you lose a combatant, even for a round, can really turn the tide of battle.

Some More Thoughs on Roll20

Our campaign continues through Lost Mines as the old group learns 5E and we all learn how best to use Roll20 from different timezones. Here are a few things I've learned about Roll20 along the way in case anyone is curious.

Discord Server is the way to go

We had problems with audio and video through Roll20. Every session started with tech support of trying to get everyone to hear everyone else. Then one of the kids set up a Discord server and we did all the videochat through that and turned it off in Roll20 and haven't had a problem since. Win!

Moving the map

Small thing but Roll20 has two icons, one for selecting things and a second for moving the map around. Its a pain shifting between the two (or forgetting to shift between the two). Turns out you can just use the select icon and right click on the map to drag it around the way you would with the hand icon. Very nice. Wish I'd found this earlier.

Remove Names

To keep track of everyone I turned on the Token names. They appeared beneath the token the entire time but eventually as we got into big brawls the names started covering up whomever was in the squares nearby which was not ideal, instead I turned on Tooltips to have names appear with a Mouseover. I may end up removing even that as the token images are enough  now to tell who is who. How to do it?

1. Select the Token and bring up the Token Settings (lower left circle when you select token). 

2. Deselect Nameplate (beside the character name). 

3. Scroll down and select Show (to the right of Tooltip).

4. Add the info into the Tooltip field.

Damage Rolls

I found out how to set it up so the system rolls player damage automatically. It even adds critical damage which is nice. Saves a lot of time because my players were slow between I hit and figuring out how to roll damage. Now I need to disable the always roll at Advantage so it doesn't add that extra damage to the rolls when not wanted. I also need to figure out how to auto-roll monster damage.

Ditching the Character Sheet, mostly

I found out how to roll for most anything without pulling up the character sheet each time. This was a game changer for me. If you do it right you select a token and get a series of buttons across the top of the map. Click a button and the game rolls as if you had brought up the character sheet and selected that thing. Because I once was a technical writer I wrote down how, but there are YouTube videos for those that prefer to sit through a half hour lesson on how to do it.

Select a token and bring up the NPC character sheet.

1. Click on Initiative

The initiative rolls in the chat.

2. Put the cursor in the Chat typing field and hit the Arrow up Key on your keyboard.

The code for rolling initiative appears in the typing field.

3. Copy the code.

5. Go to the NPC character sheet

6. Go to the Attributes & Abilities Tab.

7. Select +Add (on the upper right).

8. Select the Pencil

7. Replace the words New Ability with a title and select the Show as Token Action button.

8. Paste the code into the empty field.

9. Put the mouse over the empty spot to the right of the title, the select the Checkmark to save the ability.

Repeat for each weapon, spell, or ability you want to have access to without pulling up the character sheet. After all this whenever you select the token the attributes will appear as buttons on the top of the map so you don't have to open the character sheet again (or at least rarely). I did this for my players and it made everything smoother and they were universally impressed with the improvement in game play.

Using this I could give different Monsters multiple weapons and potentially include the damage separately if I can't figure out how to have that rolled automatically.

So the system is starting to work out very nicely.

What I'd Do, Warhammer Edition

Back in May 2019 Games Workshop was looking for a new CEO. I had some ideas of what I would do if I was CEO and re-reading them they were mostly crap. What I'd do now that I'm older and wiser i have some other ideas that may be mostly crap but...

I'd create a skirmish game. I know they already have a few like Mordheim to start with so most of the work is done. The problem is their previous skirmish games have been stand-alone. Buy it and Games Workshop never supported it. I'd support the game with campaigns full of modules like every RPG system does. This breaks down the cost of each, allows a stream of new products to draw attention, and means the newbie doesn't need a massive army to start playing as they do with Warhammer Fantasy Battle. For example: 

The Dwarven Vault campaign is about a Dwarven vault being besieged by Goblinoids. Each module would have 20ish miniatures. Different modules would cover different regions of the vault. The first could be fighting over the mines and crypts in the lower levels of the vault, a second is around the ore smelting furnaces, the third is fight in the great hall. So if you bought them in order you'd have a lot of mini's by the time you got to that big battle in the great hall. Each module would have some special tactical issues to deal with and a few additional miniatures. 

The Mordheim Campaign would do the same thing but use different parts of the city with different factions. The work has mostly been done on Mordheim already so this would be cheap and easy follow-up.

Continue that until you've given a taste of all of the major Warhammer Fantasy armies. Then when folks basically have built up a few armies over time the cost of putting together a Fantasy Army will be trivial.

I'd stop the silly lawfare Games Workshop has been waging against everybody (as if they own the term Space Marine, please) and release the skirmish game under the Creative Commons license and let others create content (knowing my, that is Games Workshop miniatures are the best and folks would buy them to play out these other games). Probably crazy but that's what I'd do.