Massive Damage In D20 Modern Games

The "gun to head" issue raised in the previous post's comments by Dunx is an interesting one and highlights a basic problem D20, a system designed (mainly) to run heroic characters through RPGs with little acknowledgement of "reality"¹, unsuited without some work to the obvious consequences of specially located damage - the headsman's axe, the bullet to the head and so on.

The D20 system enables characters to be larger than life, just as Fafhrd, Conan or Strider were, and to cheat death within the confines of a rigid, arithmetically constrained game system in the same way they would on the printed page. I salute the authors for managing to get that far, and sympathise with the problems arising from "one size fits all" thinking in the customers and gamers, while fully understanding the wish for as flexible a gaming system as possible so the player doesn't need to learn new ones every five minutes.

I enjoy playing D20-based games.

I also see the point in the reluctance of the DMs and players to adopt a one-size-fits-all "Death Damage" roll that is applied across the board. I suggested a framework for modifying that rule yesterday and I still want comments and suggestions, for and against. But my suggestion would not work well for modern weapons which can wound but also kill as a matter of luck (in the hands of the average person) or for specific cases such as a headsman's axe. For these situations I see a possible solution of a different type, that still adheres to the D20 system closely - the critical hit.

Briefly, when a weapon or class of weapons poses a real danger of killing outright in one attack - a handgun in a D20 modern setting suggests itself as the most obvious example of this - one could up the lethality of the weapon without changing the standard damage dealt by tweaking the critical hit roll needed and the damage multiplier gained.

Consider: A .32 revolver might be said to pack 1D10 + 2 (a figure I pulled out of the air for the purposes of illustration since I do not have access to a D20 modern sourcebook). Clearly people should be able to be killed or seriously wounded by a single shot, but also should be able to escape relatively unharmed for the purposes of PC heroism. One way to achieve this would be to set the Critical Hit roll needed to a relatively low number for this weapon, say 15, and let the damage multiplier be very high, maybe x4 or x5. How this would work in just about any D20-based ruleset would be that someone would shoot the gun at someone else. The shooter makes an attack roll, adding in all sorts of character-level based and circumstantial attack bonuses and/or penalties for the final score. If this score would be 15 or better (in our example) a "threat" is declared and a second attack roll made at the base chance to hit (all special circumstantial bonuses stripped off). If a hit is made under those conditions, a critical hit has been scored and the damage inflicted is multiplied up by the given amount. this means that we would deal 4D10+2 or 5D10+2 depending on what we had picked for the multiplier when we designed the weapon table. Note that death is still not guaranteed, but is much more likely. When combined with a massive damage effects rule such as I suggested yesterday, this becomes a powerful disincentive to place oneself in the path of such a weapon.

Once again, this is simply a starting point for wondering aloud how D20 might be tweaked without breaking it, not some sort of tablet from the mount. I welcome comments and suggestions.

1. And who wants that? we get that 24/7 any day we aren't gaming. The whole point is the escapism the RPG provides↑

Cross Classing in D20 Games - At What Cost?

During a game of "Conan" recently an interesting debate arose concerning Cross-Classing.

Cross-classing is the D20 mechanism by which (mostly) players earn levels in more than one character class, giving them the benefits of each at the levels they have earned. This allows, for example, a Fighter to also dabble in Druidic matters, or a Cleric to become (for whatever reason) particulalry sensitive to the ways of the Ranger.

The altruistic reason for allowing this is so that the rather artificial boundaries set by the D20/D&D "class" mechanic are blurred into a more "natural" model. The real reason is so players get buff in skills and natural abilities they otherwise would stand no chance of having at all.

It also buggers up the designed-in "nerfing" that each character class has to impose some limits on how players can behave in the game. Players, naturally, desire their characters to be renaissence men, women and werecreatures, able to turn their hands/paws to anything their little hearts desire without any hindering considerations of character background. Character classes are (partly) designed to build in reasonable limitations to character abliities (in the general sense rather than the specific D20 sense of that word). A Fighter cannot cast spells because he/she has been too busy learning to fight to pick up the knack, or has no latent ability with The Art. Cross-class that Fighter by giving him/her a level or two of Sorcerer and we have the beginings of a DM headache. Go to the cross-classing lengths some people do and that escalates into a migrane.

Which is not to say it shouldn't orta be. Cross classing makes otherwise boring character classes fun again. Of course, it does spread the perception that some classes, such as "Fighter" exsist solely to be used as a springboard for cross classing, which makes seeing a vanilla Fighter in D&D a rare thing. But with a bit of thought and a firm DM hand to keep it from getting stupidly daft, cross-classing is a bedrock part of D20 that I for one wouldn't want to see gone from the game.

The debate on Sunday arose in part because Conan encourages players to cross class. D&D has built in penalties for cross classing, but Conan removes those penalties and replaces them with benefits accrued from choosing a so-called racial "favoured class". Cross-classing incurs no penalties a-la D&D, and is much cheaper for the player in terms of Experience Point (XP) cost.

What the debate centered on (and it became quite heated I can tell you) was the XP cost that should be incurred for the new class levels.

D20 family rules that allow for cross classing usually (I don't know of one that diverges from this model, but I'm not widely read in D20-based rulesets) have it that your next character level costs whatever it costs to go to the "next level".

I'll explain that.

If you are, say, a 5th level Barbarian, and you've earned enough XP to ascend to 6th level barbarian but instead elect to "buy" a level of Thief, it costs 15,000 Experience Points (XP) according to the D20 escalation of XP costs per level. If you had bought that level of Thief for your inital character build at first level, it would have cost you 0 XP. If you had bought it for your third level it would have cost 3,000 XP. These costs are laid out in the Conan rulebook on page 40 (I think) and the D&D 3.5 Player Manual on page 9 (I think). In short, you pay the cost of the aggregate level you have achieved, but you buy the lowest "next level" you are entitled to.

One of the players felt this was monstrously unfair. He was buying a "first level", it should cost what a "first level costs" (that would be 0 XP of course, but he was under the impression it was 1000 to be fair). The DM was undecided on the matter. I felt, and still do, that it is a no-brainer. If you apply the cheaper costs, you invite hyper-characters skilled in everything under the sun, because although the maximum a player can gain is one level, the rewards at the character's other class suggested challenge rating (which is what the DM uses to set the reward levels) virtually guarrantee levels of XP remuneration that exceed the "Levelling Cost" for those low levels by many times. The rule is that a player may gain one level and retain enough XP to carry him/her to within one point of the next level. all other XP are lost. So far, so what? A player will end up earning 12 zillion XP and only being able to use 1000 of them. What's the big deal?

Consider the high-level player character who now goes out and about slaughtering otherwise puny enemies so he/she can level up in cheaper cross classes. The high levels of destruction the player can command far exceed anything an appropriate challenge for a low level character can bring to bear, making for a meaningless dice-fest.

Consider also the high-level Sorcerer who earns a bajillion XP, then asks Ron Innocent, unsuspecting DM if he may "burn some XP" as wishes for better stats, then buys a cheap low level in a cross class. The minmax potential is considerable.

I don't believe the D20 rule on this is in any way "broken". A level costs what a level costs. It is an abstraction anyway, and the extra class features that spring into being when a cross class is taken more than make up for any perceived "overcharging". But far more importantly, the "costs what it costs" version is easy to keep track of and reduces the anti-cheataccidental slip of the pen bookkeeping the DM must do to keep the game on track.

I would be interested in hearing what others think though.

Massive Damage - The D20 Rule Never Applied

One of the most often repeated critisisms of the D20 gaming system in general and the D&D game that spawned it in particular is the way players become indestructible godlike beings, requiring an ever-escalating pantheon of uber-nasties to properly challenge them (to generate the much-desired experience points (XP's) which in turn earn players more levels making them harder to kill necessitating a cast of "harder" monsters worth more XP etc etc etc).

What is almost never acknowledged in these casual conversations is that the D20 rules I've seen alway have a "Massive Damage" clause in them - that DM's never use - that attempt to stop runaway damage-proofing.

The Massive Damage clause basically says that if a character, NPC or monster sffers a blow that deals X amount of hit points (HP), he, she or it is taken to -10 hit opints and declared dead (there are game mechanics that can mean this is subtly different from just-plain-dead which are irrelevant for the purposes of this discussion). For example: the Conan D20 rules system puts this value at 20 HP lost in a single blow.

Now the argument for using this rule is fairly straightforward: It makes any game character killable no matter how many HP they have in the bank. Players cannot rely on the fact that they have reached 22nd level to save them from that pipsqueak 5th level fighter.

The argument against is also self-evident: it is monstrously unfair that the game system basis it's progression on levels and the attendant HP's, acknowledges that these are a powerful incentive to seek or avoid combat by giving different character classes different dice for the purpose - a barbarian might get d12 per level but a priest d6 - and rates the challenge each monster poses in hit dice (not, you should note, hit points) should seek to "level the playing field" in this way, setting a 22nd level barbarian general up for a death at the hands of a relative neophyte, especially if that barbarian general is a player with months of invested play-time in the character and campaign.

I sit squarely in the middle of this debate. On the one hand I, as a DM, do not want to have to deal with arcade game style escalation in HP with all the bookwork to tweak challenges accordingly, but as a player I see no earthly justification - outside of the godlike being issue - in setting an arbitrary "20 points and you're dead" level of damage.

My instincts here are that some sort of massive damage limitation is desirable, if only to promote less "Doom" - style gaming (while at the same time acknowledging the fun to be had doing that sort of game) and encourage a more "realistic" play style, but that it should be somehow scaled appropriately. This is how the issue is dealt with in BRP-sourced games like Call of Cthulhu.

I'm thinking that something of the following type might fit the bill and not annoy too many people to the point they won't play:

• When a character or monster takes 50% of its current remaining Hit Points in a single blow, it must make a Fortitude save. Saving will cause the character to be unaffected (other than the physical damage of course). Failing the save will cause it to become Staggered. The Save must be made each round or the character will remain staggered (able only to make move or standard actions)
• When a character takes 75% of its current HP in one blow it must make a Fortitude save. Making the save will result in the character becoming staggered until a second Fortitude save is made (in a subsequent round). Failuer to save will cause the character to be stunned until a subsequent Fortitude save can be made. Stunned players may not take actions but are not entirely helpless.
• If a character loses more than 75% of its HP in one blow it must make a Fortitude save. Success means the character is stunned until a subsequent Fortitude save can be made. Failure means the character is knocked unconscious, and is Helpless.
• Additional Fortitude saves may be made, one in each subsequent round, to work the character's state "up the ladder": Normal---Staggered---Stunned---KO'd
• This rule does not override the other effects of the received damage. Dead is still dead.

This is just a first cut at a vague idea. I welcome comments for, against and sideways (provided we always move the debate in an on-topic direction).

The Call of Cthulhu: Problems Posed By Tomes In The Game

Disclaimer: Ever since Sandy Petersen left Chaosium, the rules for the Call of Cthulhu have been undergoing a shift towards a "more realistic" way to present the game. I have many observations, reservations and - let's be honest - plain old fashioned whinges and whines about that. This post is certainly coloured by my feelings and I make no attempt to be neutral in my tone. I care about this stuff. All comments refer to the Basic Role Playing (BRP) rulesset unless otherwise indicated.

One of the puzzling things about the attempt to reface Call of Cthulhu with a more "realisitic" stucco over the years has been the matter of the Mythos Tome in the game.

A lot has changed since the Petersen days. The books now take unfeasibly long times to read - I seriously doubt that any Keeper¹ uses the suggested times as written in the latest version of the rules², where a copy of Al Azif - aka The Necronomicon - can take sixty-summat weeks to digest. It simply isn't feasible for players to become conversant with such volumes within a campaign structure, where they always have better things to do with their time.

Which raises problems when success hinges on the learning and deployment of a spell from such a book (which it often does in published scenarios). The hapless Keeper is faced with having to come up with a jury-rigged kluge just to make the game "work". This is unsatisfying to me. Of all the things that need fixing in the game, decent, workable rules for how to put these books to use in the game need to be worked out.

Part of the problem is an overly slavish dedication to the Lovecraft canon, or rather, certain select pieces from it. I don't know for a fact that this is the case, but I have surmised over more than three decades experience with the game the following: The game structure is largely drawn whole from the novella "The Call of Cthulhu", The campaign template from "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" and the rules for reading tomes from "The Dunwich Horror". The problem as I see it is that "The Dunwich Horror" concerns a wizard searching for the means to craft a spell, a very specific spell, from hints inside the book. He already has a debased copy of the book itself and spends a lot of time correcting it from the copy in the Miskatonic University Library. From this one rather specialised case, which is in fact more a classic example of D&D style Magical Research than an attempt to read and understand the book per se, the general rules for reading tomes seem to be drawn, and drawn so as to make the books an unattainable resource in fact, if not in spirit.

The arguments for why this should be so include the abtrusness of the material, the insanity of the author and the ancient idioms in which they are couched - all good points. But they make the tomes unplayable. If the point is that players should not have first-hand knowledge of these things but should rely on NPC intermediaries to supply tome-contained information, then why include them as player-attainable assets in the game at all³?

It is telling that no sooner does one read and absorb the Tome Times (my term) than there is a sidebar in the rulebook desperately suggesting ways to override them in specific cases. Rules that have to be overridden to become playable should never have seen the typesetting machine in the first place in my opinion.

In this search for "realism" one aspect of the whole business has remained, puzzlingly, rather abstract and unrealistic, and that is the Sanity Loss mechanic with respect to Tome reading. You read the book, taking a year or so to do so with no adverse effects or incremental benefits, and then, when it's all over, you take a sudden kick in the SAN nodes and receive a Cthulhu Mythos skill powerup. You'd think that if the editorial staff at Chaosium were going to tackle the issue of "realism" in The Call Of Cthulhu, this would be one of the places to start, but no. For some reason, this odd little mechanism has been left unchanged since the first edition.

Now it has to be said that none of my players have ever worried about this, and truth to say neither did I until I read the Tome reading rules in the D20 version of the rules, in which there is an attempt to at least represent the months-long research as an incremental process. Indeed, the BRP Keeper is well advised to take a long, hard look at the D20 rules even if he/she/it is never intending to run a game under that system, just for the fresh ideas that the authors bring to the business of presenting the game to the players.

How to "fix" all this, if indeed it really needs fixing at all, is something for another time after a lot of careful thought.

Probably the reason that players (and I) have not worried about the issue before is that reading a Tome is akin to attempting to use a one-off experience-boosting magic item in D&D, something you do for the obvious benefit and then get on with the real business at hand - whatever the campaign is calling for you to do. The rules seem to suggest that Tome Reading should be an adventure in and of itself, which isn't a bad idea per se, but the BRP rules have never suggested guidelines for doing that. In fact, they only talk of the ways that reading a Tome can be fitted into other in-game activities, which seems to be conveying the message that Tome reading is not all that important other than as background scenery.

I don't know what I'm going to do about this, or even if I'm going to do anything. I ran from first edition rules and everyone had a blast without sweating these sorts of details. It's true that the perception of how the game should be played has changed. It used to be an action/adventure game with Lovecraftian overtones. The emphasis was on the search for truth, and the almost inevitable trip into madness usually marked the end of a PCs career. Now the emphasis is on the deep immersion playing of insane characters fighting a doomed battle against unbeatable forces. The madness is seen to be the point now.

But I think I need to think it out again.

1. Call of Cthulhu speak for "DM"↑
2. 6th edition↑
3. Not an idle question. The D20 rules for Call of Cthulhu state outright that the Great Old Ones should never be met by players.↑

Unfeasible Deck Size

Another game I have that suffers from this "Oversize Deck" problem is Munchkin.

I don't mix'n'match Munchkin games. I have the original and the Cthulhu variant, and never the twain shall meet. I do, however, have six expansions added to the basic Munchkin game, making for a Door Deck climbing towards 5 inches tall. This poses two major problems:

Firstly, the largest deck, the Door Deck (Munchkin calls for two decks, the so-called "Door" and "Treasure" decks), threatens to collapse all over the playing area as the players get more animated.

Secondly, the decks are impossible to shuffle in one go. They have to be broken down into four or five smaller packages in order to shuffle them.

Short of investing in a motorized card shuffler (and don't think I haven't thought about it) the shuffling problem is par for the course. But I think I can do something about keeping the decks propped up.

Two Ideas suggest themselves. The first is a simple box in which the cards are dropped in an upright manner so that they sit on one of their short edges and lean back against the back of the box. This has the problem that the deck is thicker than a card is tall, so I'll either have to break the deck in pieces and only stack one piece at a time in a smaller box or put up with the cards slumping into a larger box once enough have been removed during play. Not optimal.

The second idea involves having the cards in a spring-fed shoe, rather like the ones seen in the Sean Connery "Bond" movies. The design could be different. A box open on one of the short sides with a spring-tensioned base and a slotted lid would do the same job.

But then there's the problem of the discard pile. It has to be looked after too since some cards allow players to root though it looking for particular cards.

Back to the drawing board.

Arkham Horror Space Woes

The New "Innsmouth Horror" expansion set has finally been distributed.

Like each of the <Blahblah>Horror expansions for this game, it is packaged in a box of about the same dimensions as the original game, and contains several additional cards for the existing decks as well as a fan of entirely new decks of cards to add to the game along with a board expansion of around 1/3rd the size of the base game board.

Put four people round a table to play this game and the problem becomes one of finding enough space for the player cards, status display sheets, various tokens that indicate money, sanity and health and I don't know what-all else, The card display for the big monster, the board, the extra board and the two dozen card decks now required to play the blasted game.

I've said elsewhere that FFG could have gone the "Formula One" route with the player displays and made them gust-of-air proof either using dials or pegs to keep track of the various customizable settings each character has. That would, of course, have driven up the cost but would also have made for one component that could be stood upright to save space. Ditto the main monster display.

But the board aside, the biggest consumers of table real estate are the card decks.

The cards vary in size. Some are the size of Pinochle cards, some about half that.

If only some way could be found to stack them in such a way that they use less space while still being easy to reach and draw cards from.

I'm working on this, but the old brain is not co-operating (as usual). I'm thinking that some sort of stand in which decks of cards can be stood on end at an angle would work. I originally thought of a slotted wooden stand, but the slots would have to be very wide to accomodate some of the decks, and there are no two decks of the same thickness, leading to more wasted space. Not only that, these bolt-on expansions always add a few inches to the overall deck thickness. Whatever it ends up looking like, the stand must be able to cater for this factor.

It's a puzzler and no mistake.

Project "Scroll"

I had this idea.

I was looking at my collection of Call of Cthulhu scenarios and campaigns, and mulling over something someone said about how White Box D&D was more about what the players could do than the characters when it came to solving mysteries, and I had a vision.

What if I could come up with a campaign-length set of linked Call of Cthulhu scenarios in which characters would obtain a huge scroll covered in glyphic writing, then go on to translate pieces of it by means of other artifacts obtained in each component adventure?

If the translations were of chunks of glyphic text, and were found on "Rosetta Stone" type artifacts such as tablets, fragmentary books and so forth, the players could add annotations to the scroll and gradually translate the entire thing, thereby uncovering some ghastly secret plot that would need thwarting as per usual for Call of Cthulhu.

There could also be some nice moments of darmatic tension when portions of already translated text were found with an alternate translation, sort of like the hieroglyphic writing correction in Star Gate (the movie).

This would be the sort of game in which relying on skill rolls would not help. The game would only progress by players actually doing the pattern matching (for that is what it is) for themselves in the real world.

Nor would the glyphic language need to be either Orthoganal to English or a true language in its own right. I'm not talking about an alphabet here. This will not be some sort of glorified cypher, but a true code.

Taking a leaf from actual glyphic written languages there won't have to be a grammar the players can learn either. It stands to reason that beings too outré to understand would use a written language that defied rational translation.

I've bandied the idea about. Some people object to my idea that players write on the scroll, claiming (quite reasonably) that no archeologist would so damage a real artifact of that type. My current view is that by allowing the players to write on the scroll they will have a nice record of where they are for those times when the game is put on lengthy hiatus or a player has an enforced absence from a few sessions, and get a very tangible sense of progress simply by looking at it.

As of now I'm firmly wedded to the idea and believe that the players won't have a problem. The issue really comes down to my wanting the players to be easily able to read what they are translating, which they won't if they first have to break up the scroll so it will fit in notebooks or sheets of scrap paper (which will then get lost). There is no requirement that the scroll the players use be regarded as the original document anyway. Indeed, it will probably be given to them with some work already done and explained away as a copy made from an original in the British Museum.

The artifacts that will be used to provide the translation will be more than the usual paper documents. I plan on having clay tablets, fragments of manuscripts, wooden plaques, pieces of vase and so on, and I'm going to need a laundry list of evocative names for these things.

So this is the challenge that I'll throw open to the floor. Suggest some nicely HPL-esque names I might use for something. You don't get to choose what it is to be used on. Your idea of a perfect name for an ancient scroll might be my idea of a great name for a cave painting. But I would welcome any suggestions you might have.

My first thought along these lines is "The Pottergate Shard" (most cities have a district called pottergate or something similar, the one I'm thinking of is in Norwich, England).

I'll repost any and all suggestions in the next blog posting on this thread, to be made I don't know when.