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).