Best of the Web - Barbarians and Abstract Combat

I read two posts recently that separate were okay, but when put together got my imagination churning. 

The first was an old post (July 2008) by Noisms at Monsters and Manuals called I hate Barbarians [Warning: Rant] in which he rants (he did warn you) that Barbarians should be a fighter combined with role playing and not a class of their own. For reasons or archetype and potential racism. He makes a lot of good points but I'm not sure I'm sold, still it was on my mind.

The second was on the blog Ongoing Campaign by faoladh. The post was called Abstract Combat in AD&D 1st Edition. I played a lot of 1E back in the day and we always called who we would attack so it was a surprise to read a quote from the DMG basically saying it should be more random than that. Then in the comments faoladh says: 

"Specifically notable, there is no situation for a "set-piece battle" as opposed to a "swirling melee". The only thing described is a melee, which is described elsewhere (I think in the missile rule) as everyone within 10 feet of an opponent, and a single melee is all of the combatants who can be connected by being within 10 feet of anyone in that same melee."

That bit was the chocolate in my peanut butter bit. Basically we have two types of battle, the set piece as most people already play it, and the swirling melee as 1E was written. We also have two types of fighters, the fighter (set-piece) and the Barbarian (swirling melee). 

Set Piece Battle Rule

If 3 or more fighters (optionally a Cleric might count) work together they turn any melee into a set-piece battle. They become an island of stability in the chaos of battle. Enemies will come to them to attack, movement in combat and attacks of opportunity are a thing, and their allies can select targets (most notably thieves and archers can better do their thing). If the number of fighters drops in numbers due to wounds or whatever the battle devolves into a swirling melee in which nobody can pick targets, movement and attacks of opportunity are ignored and considered just part of the melee, and basically everything is a lot more random. 

Barbarians don't have the discipline to fight in units, they do not count as part of a set-piece or take advantage of the set-piece even if they are allies. No matter what they do they fight swirling melee style, always fighting random enemies in the melee.

Lastly Barbarians should be called Berserkers as that's really what the class is talking about with the Rage business anyway. 

How To Run Combat

James Young at Ten Foot Polemic has a nice post on combat called TFP DMG: How To Run Combat. It's good stuff, especially the idea of the wrestling. 

Tiger's don't stand off 10 feet away swiping with their claws, they jump on their opponent in what is a bit of a blend between wrestling and melee. If you treat their claws like daggers the wrestling rules in the post should work nicely. I use Tiger's as an example but really any animal you can imagine is likely to bull rush their target making stand-off weapons more difficult. This would make fighting animal-like beasts feel very different than fights against armed opponents as it should be and could make fights against Ogres (who are very bear-buggy) or some other weapon-less humanoid feel very different.

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Mead & Mayhem a sort of review

 I just bought this short supplement. 14 pages counting the cover and the afterward stuff. It's dirt cheap and the bulk of the thing is a table you roll every round of combat in a tavern brawl with results getting worse the higher the roll. Many of the rolls will add or subtract from the previous roll increasing or decreasing the temperature of the thing.

The table is long, and whimsical, and brilliant.

This is the sort of thing we should have for regular combat. I can see a monster manual with a similar, but shorter, table per creature creating ambiance in addition to the normal dice mechanics. The table could include Gelatinous Cube humming some kind of strange music (making it see more Lovecraftian), or spouting out strange liquids on everyone blinding or making things slippery, or the muffled screams of a previous partially digested victim, that sort of thing. 

Add to that a short table of room related things that might happen (Stone or dirt falling from ceiling, tremor in the floor, blast of air that puts out torches, torch fell over and started a fire, whatever). A good fight in a movie always has extra stuff going on. I'm not talking the mini-stakes the character has to manage in addition to the fight like Indiana Jones trying to get the vial of antidote in the middle of the fight at the start of the Temple of Doom, but more like trying to avoid the propeller blade and the landing gear of that weird German plane during his fight in Raiders. Jackie Chan movies are filled with incidental things he uses in his fight, a lot of that stuff could be put on a table and tossed around, broken, or just become an extra hurdle to manage during a fight. Some may cause benefits or difficulties, most will just provide atmosphere beyond to hit and damage rolls.

Let the GM roll and pick their preferred result every round. I think I'm going to have to work on this sort of thing in the back of my brain and see what comes out.

Anyway Mead & Mayhem is a great product cheap, creative, and it spurs the creativity in all the best ways. Check it out.

Not Dead Yet

 I've been writing Fantasy Heartbreakers for some time. I've made a few. One motivator is that I'm a technical writer by day. I have no control over what I write about or even the style. Being a trained Graphic Designer this leaves me a bit frustrated as I like playing with fonts and page layout.

So before Covid hit I was invited to play 5E with a guy who worked with my wife. I read up on the game and made a character, and we had one game before the world shut down.

So back to reading those rules. I read the hardcover and the free-be rules and found them both lacking. There is a combination of writing for newbies with an organization that leaves you confused. I played AD&D back in the day so I muddled through it but the thing should have been better. It was overdone and begging to be streamlined. It might have great mechanics but they weren't as clearly laid out as I felt they should have been. There is a thing with writing that sometimes you review your own work and you see what you knew you wrote, not what you actually wrote, and I think there was a bit of that going on when they organized the book. I could be wrong, who knows. 

So then, before Covid, my step-daughter, her boyfriend and another friend tried to get into a game at our local game store on beginners day and were given a bad time. They didn't have characters written up and the store seemed to not want them there. Being charitable I can assume the DM who runs the beginners table on Mondays was out, or he thought they wanted to play just so they could mock everything. Being not-charitable, being rude to newbies is hardly the way to expand the game and the Game Store running the tables should fire that person if they don't have a really good reason why.

She told me about it recently and it made me think back on 5E again, and I decided my next project, my next Fantasy Heartbreaker would be to gut, re-organize, and reskin the 5E rules to make them usable.

I tried to keep it as pure as possible but I simply couldn't. I hate spell slots so I had to change that. I decided to go for a Dark Fantasy feel so Halfling and Elves were out (although I'll do something with them alter). Tieflings and Dragonborn are just stupid, so they were gone. I like group initiative every round so I had to change that as well. So there are little changes, but nothing that would be confusing for someone playing Not Dead Yet and then moving on to 5E.

I also decided I would organize it compartmentally, that is trying to keep bits on a page or 2-page spread so that a topic didn't share space with a different topic. This would make it easier for someone to remove my Movement section and add their own, or remove how I handle Spellcasting and add their own using a PDF divider and merger.

So that is the backstory of Not Dead Yet. I expect to discuss why I made certain design choices on this blog, and perhaps include examples.  So here is a link to the game: 

DELETED THE LINK in disgust at OGL 1.1

Best of the Web - Space 1977, Chris Pine cast, Urban Spirits

 Skerpies over at Coins and Scrolls has an interesting post called Sci-Fi: Space 1977 - An Analysis of Failure in which he talks about a setting comprised of various Star Wars knock-offs. I really like the idea but think a similar idea might be more to my tastes: 

A setting comprised of the Aliens knock offs. Outland, Mutant, Forbidden World, Galaxy of Terror, Xtro, and Dead Space. You could even throw in Killer Klowns, the Thing, and all the underwater ones. If you were willing to really dredge deep there are dozens of additional entries.

A setting comprised of various Sword & Sorcery knock-offs that came in the wake of the Conan movie. Beastmaster, Hawk the Slayer, Sword & Sorcerer, Deathstalker 1-4, Barbarian Queen, The Barbarians, and probably a bunch of horrid others. 

I think most DM's back in the day picked and pulled at the parts we liked and maybe filed off the serial numbers.

Tenkar has a post about Chris Pine being cast in a D&D movie called D&D Movie News - Chris Pine (Capt Kirk in the new Star Trek Movies) Will Star

Chris Pine is a good actor. He's been good in everything I've seen him in, and will do well but if I ran the movie studio I wouldn't try to make a Lord of the Rings knockoff. I'd go small, hire Dan Harmon to write and direct, Joe Manganiello to star as the hero, Vin Diesel as the baddie, Patton Oswald as the comedic side-kick. I'd have just about every actor that has ever admitted playing the game to star, co-star, or make a cameo. Have the movie be a comedy about a group going into a dungeon again and again and again and getting torn up but persevering. Concentrate on the zero, not the hero, as that'll be for the sequels.

Elfmaids & Octopi has a post called Urban Spirits that was fun and dripping with creativity. The idea is spirits are everywhere, and goes on to list different types of spirits and where they might be found in an urban landscape including tables of petty spirit powers and a list of 100 Petty Urban Spirits. The whole reminds me of the Bard books by Keith Taylor (which are out of print and I had to rediscover through eBay, and he never made the fifth available outside Oz for some reason, but I digress). Bard's magic was all about getting elementals to do things for him. He could see water elementals in the river and air elementals in the sky when others couldn't and with his music he could convince them to do what he wanted. The big difference is urban areas were dead zones. I like the idea of a divide, nature spirits out side the town where nature runs free, and the spirits of the dead (those 100 Petty Urban Spirits) remain in the town. 

Beyond the theoretical kind of info GMs like and players ignore this sort of thing might provide advantage for Necromancers in the city and Druids outside, and I can imagine a Magic Item that allows a possessor to see the spirits in a They Live fashion which would be fun and might work into a plot hook or two.

A Replacement for HP

Grognardia has been talking about Ability scores recently which got me thinking of the way I handled such in one of my Fantasy Heartbreakers. Anyway I thought I'd write it up here as the old Fantasy Heartbreaker is long gone. 

Damage types are already built into 5E more or less. Whatever damage the weapon does, roll and apply the damage to the corresponding Attribute.

‣ STR - Anyone reduced to 0 STR falls prone and is unable to move at all. 

‣ DEX - Anyone reduced to 0 DEX or less falls prone and is unable to move at all. 

‣ CON - Anyone reduced to 0 CON or less is Dead.

‣ INT - Anyone reduced to 0 INT or less is unconscious and will take 1 CON point a round until healed back to 1 INT. 

‣ WIS - Insanity. Anyone reduced to 0 WIS or less is catatonic. 

‣ CHA - Burn/Electrical Wound. Anyone reduced to 0 CHA or less is Dead.

All damage heals at 1 point per week.

This mechanic was created when I was in love with the Black Hack which used Ability Scores for every attribute test so dropping one caused an instant game effect. It should apply to 5e easily enough even if it works on modifiers and not upon the Ability Scores directly  (bludgeoning = blunt, Slashing = Edge, Piercing = point). I gave up the idea in the name of simplicity and compatibility but I still like the system in theory and might use it someday.

 

Battle Mage Brewing Company and Hârn

I finally cleaned out the garage enough that I was able to move the contents of my storage unit in there. Now the bulk of my old gaming stuff is ready to read and not a short drive away which is nice. While doing that I found my old map of Hârn, Ivania, Shorkyne, and Trierzon as well as a nice map of medieval England that also came from Columbia games for their Lionheart setting.

Originally I had these in nice frames with glass which was nice as you could write on the glass, but it made them heavy that you had to be careful where you mounted them. I hate molly bolts so I decided instead to mount them on foam core which was light and looked good. 

Now the maps were collecting dust and had nowhere to go. Unfortunately my local game store had been shut down for a year because of Covid or I would have brought them there. Instead of putting them in the dumpster I brought them over to Battle Mage Brewing Company. They said they didn't have much wall space and couldn't guarantee they wouldn't be put in the dumpster but I suspect they won't. I suspect if they don't have room somewhere they'll put a sticky on them saying free and someone will take them away. They are amazing maps, beautiful and useful, and I'd hate to see them trashed. Hopefully the Battle Mages found them a home.

Battle of Five Armies and RPG

In most campaigns the characters find treasure, put it on their character sheets, and continue adventuring. It is as if they could just haul off Smaug's pile of treasure from under Lonely Mountain. This attitude misses a huge opportunity I call, for obvious reasons, the battle of five armies.

If the characters are ever so lucky as to find a large horde of treasure it is very likely others would try to make claims on it as the Elves and Orcs and humans all did at the end of the Hobbit. Even if the gold wasn't as famous as the pile of the King Under the Mountain there are rumors most likely. Those same rumors that brought the characters there in the first place ensure others know about the horde. It's possibly other groups have used spies to keep an eye on the treasure hunters. Once it is found such wealth only needs to be taken.

Players may resort to burying treasure, but that might be found by others later, or you might have the pirates problem that one of the folks that knows the location might come back for it on their own. 

Another option is to hire people to haul the treasure away. It is likely such hiring will make keeping the project a secret nearly impossible. Other adventuring parties, and local warlords and kings will find out before long and they'll all want a cut.

This creates two fun elements to the end game. First, you have factions. Factions are the meat and drink of good role playing campaigns. A clever party can work one faction against the other.  Second, by wheeling and dealing or even failing that large treasure pile will be reduced in size significantly. If things work out characters might feel super-victorious just to survive with a fraction of the original treasure.

This also leads to potential future allies and more importantly enemies. And on going enemies are super-useful in a campaign.

Quotes: Stephen Colbert

Stephen Colbert: “What would you do, when coming up with your character you roll six rolls of three six-sided dice to come up with your character”

Joe Magliano: “There’s a new way now where you roll 4d6 and you take away the lowest.”

Stephen Colbert: “Really? That’s for children!”

Very funny. Colbert is more old school than Gygax who used 4d6 and toss the lowest in his house rules.

Best of the Web - Taverns

 First up Signs in the Wild has a wonderful post called Tavern generator that provides names and features for taverns. It's a wonderful bit of work. And coincidentally around the same time Konsumterra at Elfmaids & Octopi came up with post called d100 Tavernkeepers Adventure Tips which provides one hundred interesting tips that can be used in that newly created tavern.

The Wandering Gamist has a post called Rival Adventuring Parties and Dungeon Maps as Treasure which has one of those ideas that made me hit my forehead that it never occurred to me. Rival Adventuring parties should also have maps. The Gamist talks about stealing their map but the post got me thinking (which is common with most posts that end up in my Best of the Web posts). 

I think if parties don't straight up fight they might compare maps. If they came in the same way they may straighten out some mapping issues, if they came in from different entrances they may help double the mapped areas of the dungeon while also providing a rational for why an area has more empty rooms than normal. 

I also like the idea of certain rooms that delvers draw maps and warnings and notes on the walls to help others giving the area a Landmark feel to part of a dungeon. Perhaps a wall is dedicated to the names of delvers that died in the dungeon and how they died. Such a room might be where folks drop off their extra iron rations and bronze coins that delvers decided weren't worth the effort to lug out of the dungeon. It might be wear henchman wait for their employers to return and as such might have a growing pile of firewood. It would likely have stout doors to act as a place for a long rest, and it might have a lock or two on each door so that only one with a key or a decent lockpicker could gain entrance (hoping to keep wandering beasts out). I like this idea, I believe cavers do something along those lines. 

Crazy Thoughts - Modules designed for six to nine player...

 Every modules does it. They are designed for a large group of PC. Keep on the Borderlands was for six to nine player characters of 1st level. Tales of the Yawning Portal's first adventure (the only one that lists the number of players) says it is for a party of four to five 1st level characters. I'm not sure what the average group of players is but 4-5 sounds more likely than 6-9. 

But what if they wrote modules for 2-4 players. Instead of adding a bunch of hirelings and NPC to minimal player sessions you'd be ready to go, and if you had a slightly larger group the GM just doubles the numbers in each encounter. 

Or, since 5E punts the statblocks to another book you could write them all up to include a small/med/large party with minimal effort. That way you could make one super-boss monster instead of have two or three different ones because you doubled the numbers as suggested in the last paragraph.

It would sure be easier writing encounters for a small number of adventurers and the process of scaling up would mostly be easy.

Anyway its just a crazy thought, not fully formed yet. I just remember GMing one-on-one and two-on-one back in the day and setting up adventures was super-easy.

Initial post on the new blog

I had a blog called Grindstonë Games in which I mostly cleaned up and posted stuff that had been sitting in an RPG folder on my laptop for some time. Stuff that was on my old Macintosh Classic and copied over again and again. Some of it was good, some was terrible, the blog helped me organize my thoughts on different RPG matters but it was nothing serious. 

When I created it I didn't see any other Grindstone's out there, then two years later I found a bunch of them. I don't know if my first search was badly executed or if they all sprung up in the mean time but the fact was they were out there and I didn't like sharing the name because that could mean potential confusion, which sucks so I went with Ruprecht's RPG Blog. Searching for Ruprecht mostly comes up with that weird Krampus or Knecht Ruprecht which is far enough removed I don't see a problem.

Since Blogger allows you to change the name of your Header but not the URL I felt the best course was to junk the old blog and start a new one and transfer the content. I'll clean up some of the stuff and repost it as pdfs, and delete some of the stuff, but basically its the same guy doing the same thing as before, except a little differently. 

Back on that other blog I tried to post something every weekday. I don't think I'll even try to do that. I had posts ready to go weeks ahead to time at some point but trying to keep up with deadlines creates stress, even on an amateur RPG blog, so I won't even set that goal.

I'm a big fan of Sergio Aragonés artwork and especially Groo the Wanderer. I've used Groo as my avatar for years when I post online and now I've put him on the masthead. I make no claims to the art and will replace it once I've gotten to drawing my own stuff. Photoshop has managed to really cripple my drawing skills over the years but I think it can all be reclaimed if I put the effort out. I'll post art here if I finish any.

So that's the story of the new blog. Stick around, I hope you like it.