One Page Class Powers: Fighter Feats from Damage Dice

As I've mentioned before, I like the idea of the DCC-RPG's Mighty Deeds of Arms but think their extra dice rolling and table looking-up will slow down combat rather than juicing it up excitingly.

My goal was to design a feats system that proceeded more or less automatically from what the fighter was already doing. True to my vision of the class, the fighter, unlike the rogue, shouldn't need to think as much. He wades into combat with a few minimal tactical precautions and the normal dice rolls do the work.

The second insight was to reduce the table weight (and page space) by using tables I was already using: my critical hit and fumble tables.

The follow-through power, as I note, is not original, but it's classic and it balances the "unhinge the big guy" of the feats with "plow through the little guys."

A caution, though: these rules work best with some other assumptions I make in house-rules, such as that light weapons don't get full super-exceptional Strength bonuses (otherwise dagger + 18 STR = super punch up machine), and that "smashing and bashing" weapons like axes and maces have damage scores in the form d6+1 (for example) while swords and spears have damage scores in the form d8 (for example). This makes the smashers more likely to score Force feats and the slashers more likely to score Finesse feats.

The only extra dice roll is the save, but I felt that was only fair to avoid fighters pushing around much tougher enemies. In a pinch you can say that they only work on a successful hit and forget the save. Does that appeal? Yea or nay ...

The Character's Hit Points

My current game goes with the idea that the hit points of player characters and other beings with character levels represent some intangible essence that keeps them safe from serious harm until they fall to zero. Thereafter, a table of serious injuries applies. I have the severity determined by what fraction of the character's Constitution score they take below zero, though for simplicity's sake boundaries at -3 and -6 might also work, or even a die roll modified by the negative damage for real uncertainty.

Here's the table in one page rules format. In play we had some questions about how zero-level NPCs use this chart, so I created a "monster" result for them and monsters. Yep, monsters are going to be somewhat harder to kill now, though they'll at least have the grace to remain stunned for a while. Monsters without the appropriate body part will still be stunned.

click for full size

The one remaining question is what hit points mean under this system ... which I'll happily defer till next post.

The Battleship's Hit Points

Hit points evolved from the game Battleship? Close.

Dave Arneson in this interview traces the concepts of hit points (and armor class, for that matter) back to when he exapted his US Civil War ironclads rules to represent heroic characters in a skirmish game. Both this system and the Milton Bradley system are great to model floating hulls that can take only so much structural damage before sinking.

And by the way, the "hit or no hit" way armor works in D&D also comes from this simulation of a floating hull where the armor is part of the structure. A shell either bounces off or penetrates it. There is no partial damage reduction because there is no meaty interior to the armored shell.

So, all you 8th level fighters are running around absorbing hits like the Graf Spee. Ridiculous, from a simulation point of view. But perfectly adapted to a gamer's need to act heroically - and that, in the end, is why hit points won out in gaming over limb-maiming and eye-gouging wound systems. Arneson even noted that a main reason to adopt the battleship system was to protect heroic characters from the instant, low-probability death possible under the Chainmail rules.

The hit point system means you are a hero at full fighting capacity right to your last gasp. It doesn't wear you down in a death spiral of diminishing returns. And it's easier to choose your battles, withdraw from a hairy situation, know when you've had enough.

More realistic combat systems hold open the possibility of random death or disablement with every blow. With smart players, this can make for an interesting game. It deters players from going into combat with weak creatures just to rack up experience points; makes them afraid to fight and eager to embrace alternative solutions. But sometimes you do want a game where characters fearlessly fight on, and hit points help that along.

My preference is for a game system that hedges its bets, combining these two features in a fair and fun way. Early on in D&D, house rules often adopted critical hit systems to make combat more realistic and deadly - the most influential of these being Iron Crown's Arms/Claw Law which would later evolve into the Rolemaster system. These also seem to be inspired by the critical hits found in some naval warfare systems, simulating lucky shots that blow up a ship's powder magazine or kill its captain. All very well when you have no personal investment in this or that ship. But the problem, as Gygax astutely notes in AD&D, is that spearing monsters through the eye may be fun, but having your own heroic character speared through the eye is not so fun.

The alternative Gygax proposed was a system of critical injury at zero or negative hit points, where player characters could still survive but were in danger of bleeding out at -10, losing 1 hp/round. Later refinements on this system have tied the negative points to Constitution, applied damage beyond hit points to ability scores more generally (for example Errant RPG), or effectively scored random critical hits with each blow received at zero or less (for example, the many variants on death and dismemberment tables).

In actual play, the last of these gives a nice balance; a zone where characters feel safe, and then a zone where they are at risk of death but still can survive by luck, and get afflicted with really impressive scars, maimings and war wounds. More on the nuts and bolts of that system next post.

Another Simpler DCC Idea: Wild & Critical Spells

So it seems the Mighty Deeds (why did I think Feats?) commentary and replacement rule was well received. Here's another idea for taking a complex rule from Goodman's Dungeon Crawl Classics game, and making it more modular and compatible with the standard run of D&D clones and variants.

Via LevinLight Wiki

Instead of having a separate table for wacky results for each spell, why not have the wacky results be ... other spells?

You can get more extreme with this, in terms of abandoning the spell slot system, but I want to work this out sticking as closely to the classic fire-and-forget casting system as possible. Another insight: "no result" is boring and frustrating for spellcasters. So I'm just excluding it as a possibility.

Whenever a magic-user is going to cast a spell, before the player has stated the targeting and area of the spell, roll d20.

The spell goes wild on a 1 if the caster can use spells of a higher level than the one being cast, or a 1-2 if the spell is of the caster's highest level. Add 1 to this wild range for every 2 points the caster's Wisdom is below 9, and subtract 1 if the caster's Wisdom is 13 or above.

The spell goes critical on a 20, a 19-20 if the caster's Wisdom is below 9, and 18-20 if it is below 5. There is no chance to go critical if Wisdom is 13 or above. Yes, magic-users may want to lose Wisdom to become more powerful and random, which is why some spend so much time delving into secrets of forbidden knowledge (insert sanity loss=wisdom loss system here).

Wild Spell: Roll at random on the list of magic-user spells for that level. The magic-user casts that spell instead, whether or not he or she knows it, but may target it at will. If you rolled by chance the spell the magic-user was trying to cast in the first place, the spell escalates; go to the next highest level, the magic-user picks a spell that will not be cast, and roll on that spell level table to find out the spell that is cast. If the spell picked is rolled, escalate to the next highest level, and so on.

A creative DM may have some of the spell's effect or style influenced by the spell originally cast. For example, a magic-user trying to cast Web who casts ESP instead may find that cobwebs appear on the walls, that shout out and echo the thoughts of the closest sentient being.

Critical Spell: Roll 2d6 and take the lower:
1: The spell is cast with double range, double duration, + 1 to each damage die, and -2 to saving throw.
2: The spell, once cast, is replaced in memory by a random spell of the same level.
3: The spell is cast with double effect (area or damage, for example) or with -4 to saving throw.
4: The spell is cast without using it up in memory.
5: The spell has its usual effect plus the effect of a spell the caster chooses of the same level or 1 level higher.
6: Roll twice, and 6 has no effect.

I think this system has a good chance to walk the line between player boredom and total player screwage. Instead of "you fail" it's more like "hey, make the most of Rope Trick right now."

One DCC Comment: Fighter Feats

Having now read the Dungeon Crawl Classics beta document, and observed the whirlstorm and piñata party of posting around it, I find that most things I want to say about it have already been said.

My personal reaction is: it could be great fun as a convention one-shot, but not something I'd use or even plunder for a campaign. The game is indeed old school, but think 1980 rather than 1975, and a 1980 that never existed at that. Imagine if every producer of heartbreakers and complications for the ol' roleplaying chassis had asked, not "How do I make this more realistic?" but "How do I make this more crazy and fun?" Imagine if in 2008, the Wizards team had asked, not "How do I make this more balanced and tactical?" but "How do I make this more crazy and fun?" That is certainly the obvious aim of this game. I'll reserve judgment on whether it is actual fun until such time as I sit down and play.

Also, I especially enjoyed the line drawings by Peter Mullen. They are like Sidney Sime's material as drawn by Tove Jansson, in other words, double weird fantastic.

But I want to focus in on one specific reaction I had (and Mr. Rients, too, in his scrawlings). I really liked the idea that fighters had a special power that they could use with some of their attack rolls, to do improvised maneuvers like knock an enemy back. The "Mighty Feats of Arms" in the player's section are great, and presented in the right amount of detail.

Then you get to the judge's section. And each MFoA is presented in excruciating detail, with a paragraph detailing the exact result in game terms for each level of success rolled.

Once you have written a rule you cannot unwrite it. It doesn't matter if you have encouraged the judge and players to "be creative, hey presto old school." The space for that creativity has to be kept open by not making any kind of official rule. Otherwise, whatever you improvise might be seen, on a later perusal, to be "wrong" or lacking.

In other words, if this was my reaction to the Mighty Feats rule for the players:

the judge section did this:

This betrays a fundamental uncertainty about audience. Are you writing for the kind of confident judge and players who feel good about improvising? Are you writing for the less than confident judge and players who need rules guidance at every step? Or are you writing  to help the second group make the transition to playing as the first group? DCC (and not just on this issue) seems to preach for the first group but practice for the second. I'll also note that there's precious little material out there that tries for the third goal.

By the way, if you want to implement "Mighty feats" in a more standard D&D-style game without rolling an extra die, a quick solution might be to roll the fighter's weapon damage die whether or not the hit succeeds, and have a feat-style effect happen on a natural 1 or 2. This advantages the dagger and other low-damage weapons, but also gives somewhat of a consolation prize for missing in combat.

One-Page Crits & Fumbles

I realized that since the first of my one-page graphic play aids got posted here, I'd developed a couple more we use in the Trossley game that I hadn't shared with the class. Both are based on a rough mapping of 2d6, take the lower, to anatomical results. Here's the first one: crits and fumbles, a further working-out of the system I shared previously.

The point of 1 page, 18 point is you shouldn't have to click to enlarge...

I find that neither natural 1's nor natural 20's should be apocalyptic in their results. If they add some craziness and unpredictability to combat, that's good.

The only dangling end is what happens when a missile weapon fumbles. I've been applying the results but it's clear that some of them don't make sense. It's hard to see how a fumbled bowshot could stun you about the head, for instance - leaving aside the incident last night where a notably hapless henchman had a fumbled sling wrap around his head and spent the next round untying it. Any ideas from those of you who use fumbles?

Crits and Fumbles

This is the the table - short, impressionistic and easy to remember - that I use for critical hits and fumbles.

I'm definitely of the "low impact" school of special combat effects. Not so much getting your eye poked out (that's a result for below 0 hit points - another table to work up) or maiming your buddy with a wild swing, but just minor effects that add flavor to the flow of a combat.

When someone rolls a natural 20 to hit in my game, I use the table to help decide what happens. The victim of the hit chooses whether to take maximum damage from the hit, or to roll the damage normally and suffer a random mishap from the table. If the mishap doesn't apply - for example, nothing is carried in a particular hand, or a creature doesn't have a head - then maximum damage has to happen.

As fumbles, the mishaps can also occur on a natural to hit roll 1, for the character who rolled it, but in that case there is no consequence if a particular mishap doesn't apply.

Click to see all

I will sometimes allow a save to avoid the effects, if conditions are particularly good to avoid them. For example, if wearing a helmet, you can make a Body save (with a constitution-based bonus) to avoid being stunned for 1 round; if not, the save avoids being stunned for 2 rounds instead of 1. If solidly positioned on good dry footing, you can make a Speed save (with dexterity-based bonus) to avoid falling. If your held item is a greatsword and the opponent's is a dagger, that's also Body to avoid dropping it. "Repositioning" covers things like charging past an opponent, or them slipping around your back.

Right now, breakage tests are ruled according to common sense, but I'm working on a system to handle quick and easy non-living object damage. That and the "death and dismemberment" table I want to use are both coming up.