The Save-Or-Die Remedy

Save-or-die poison is a corner often cut when reviving the Old School. Losing that seventh-level character to one bad die roll seems so unfair. So poison becomes a matter of hit points ... or just a knockout, not a killer ... myself, I have been giving players an extra saving throw, the first to avoid being incapacitated, the second to avoid death from the poison's effects.

But in our last session of play, gearing up to fight a venom-tailed wyvern, the player innocently asked if they could buy some anti-venom at the apothecary in town. With a successful availability roll (-3 seemed about right), a flask of the substance was found. After some haggling ("what price life itself?") the sovereign antitoxin was procured for a measly hundred silver pieces and packed on the person of the dwarf. Good thing, too; in the combat, the self-same dwarf, being the party member least likely to do so, failed a poison save, but had the remedy quick to hand and chugged it before the poison could take effect.

(I'm just noticing, by the way, that I don't feel the need to explain the silver standard in my game. Why? Well, even D&D Next uses it now.)

Although I may want to increase the standard price, there's no doubt to me that making antitoxins readily available through alchemists and apothecaries is a good move. Play-wise, it lets the threat of lethal poison remain, while offering a way out of its dangers through skillful planning and treasure spending. In terms of historical legends and folklore, a huge number of things were supposed to be a sovereign remedy for poison:

• Bezoar (calcified stone found in the stomach)
• Toadstones (stones spit out by a toad)
• The correct half of a toad liver
• Powdered amethyst or emerald
• Herbs: Garlic, Vervain, Betony, Mistletoe, Mithridatum, Theriac
• Unicorn horn
• Confection of Cleopatra (not the best spokesmodel for surviving poison, but you have to agree she's strangely appropriate for a beverage of musk, birthwort and scorpions macerated in wine) 

Never mind that most of these are nonsense or, by sympathetic magic, obviously poisonous themselves. Never mind that poison was rare enough so that these overhyped antidotes almost never had to pass their screen test. Leaving to more obsessive minds the distinction between snake, insect, chemical and plant poisons, let's consider the standard, composite kind of antidote in the game to be as effective as the mythical bezoar or unicorn horn, against all sorts of ingested, inhaled and injected toxins.

Such a sovereign antidote costs, as base, 200 sp and has availability -3. It is a small, non-encumbering flask. After a failed poison saving throw incapacitates a character, he or she has only 1 round (6 seconds) of feeble ability to take out and apply the antidote. Beyond that, active colleagues have 5 more rounds to administer an antidote. Success means recovery from incapacitation in d6 minutes.

Poison is common enough between monsters, traps, potions, and villainous weapons that it's really something adventurers should have some kind of chance against.

Hit Dice Quirks: 4+4 or 5?

In some old-school d20 rulesets, such as Labyrinth Lord or its source Basic D&D game, hit points added to a monster's hit dice are just a "bump" up to the next hit die, so a creature with 4+4 dice attacks as a 5 hit die creature. Others, such as Swords & Wizardry or 2nd Edition AD&D, base their attacks on straight hit dice, so a creature with 4+4 dice attacks as a 4 hit die creature. Lamentations/WFRP's core rulebook still doesn't say how monsters get attack bonuses ... Anyway, my game uses the S&W convention, easier to remember.

With this system, and d8 as your hit die, each plus of 4 1/2 ends up averaging out to another hit die, and a 9+9 HD creature has the exact same average number as an 11 HD creature (49.5); just a tighter spread (18 to 81 vs. to 8 to 88). But, the 11HD creature is better at attacking and saving throws.

What I wonder is how much monster design takes this feature into account. There's a certain inertia when it comes to messing around with the ogre's 4+1 or the troll's 6+6, arbitrary figures seared into a generation's brains from adolescence.  After a while, hit dice codes seemed to be put out there for sheer novelty value, jumping the wereshark in Monster Manual 2 with stuff like 13+39 (the arcanadaemon), 2+8 (the tri-flower frond) or 7 plus, um, 3d4 (the annis). Keep in mind that each +3 hp counts as an extra hit die when attacking, by 1st Edition AD&D rules. Math is hard!

Or is that seven, plus three, minus twelve? Or 10-19 HD?

Anyway, back to straight-up hit dice combat tables. Why shouldn't the hill giant - long on endurance, short on skill - fight with 6+10 instead of 8+1 hit dice? Is a S&W cockatrice with 5 HD really better at attacking than a near-equivalent werewolf with 4+4? What about more fragile creatures with ample skill and fortune, like sprites or bird-men - shouldn't they have minuses (4-2 hit dice)?

OK, I find that it's hard to mentally budge those iconic numbers for the classic monsters. But maybe it's a thought when we turn to designing new ones.

Who Rolls?

It's Delta's in-depth recounting of a run of Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl that has me thinking again about saves and hit rolls (previously on RRR), and in particular the part about giving monsters saves against critical hits:

Since the "save" is in the hands of the target, the player doesn't potentially "fail" at a confirm roll to end their round on a sour note (instead, the experience is that the monster target managed to skillfully avoid a potentially devastating strike).

Common wisdom has it that the more rolls a danger resolution has, the more bogged down it gets. Simplicity is the grail, so two-roll combat is great and if you can get it down to one roll so much the better. Right?

Well, the one-roll versus two-roll debate rages in the halls of miniatures wargaming, from where the concept of the saving throw came. And here we find - as Delta found - that some people like distributing the rolls between the players. The reason in wargaming is slightly different. In a game with dozens of figures on either side, it's desirable to have both players engaged in the action at all times.

In a smaller, skirmish sized game with less of a player downtime problem, it may still be desirable for both sides to roll dice in any given resolution. Influential systems like Runequest and GURPS have taken this approach, and there are a couple of benefits:

1. Probabilities work out cleaner. For example, in one-roll standard 20 combat, a -3 to hit when you hit only on a 17 means you will be doing 1/4 of your average damage per round, as 3 of your 4 hit chances on d20 are taken away. But a -3 to hit when you hit on an 8 means your hit chance goes from 65% to 50%, reducing your average damage only by a third. This makes rules like "you may take -2 to hit in order to get +2 Armor Class" subject to game-y thinking in a single-hit system. For example, a well-armored and skilled fighter against a weaker for should always take this option, because it hurts the enemy much more than it hurts you. Bonuses or penalties to a separate defense roll, though, are not affected by "to hit" probabilities on attack.

2. More interactive feel. Delta's observation is sound. Who rolls the die can make a psychological difference, and having both sides roll allows the most give and take between the players and the "world."

One way to keep things simple is to divide up the task in the classic D&D manner, so that for combat the attacker rolls, but for dangers and traps (and crits in Delta's game) the defender rolls. 4th edition divides things up somewhat differently. Saves are now reserved for trying to break free of ongoing effects like poison or slowing, while things like traps and spells make attacks.

There's also the solution I came up with for my dodge defense rule (here, bottom right of sheet) only to find that Errant RPG has a similar idea. Forget  the weaksauce +2 to AC that 1st edition gives you for giving up your whole attack. I answer the question "why can't you save against a melee swing the same way you save against a spear trap?" by letting characters do just that - if they dedicate themselves to concentrating on defense instead of attacking. By replacing the attack roll, the total amount of dice slinging is kept constant.

Anyway, the basic design lesson: while fewer dice often means more, fewest is not always best. There are good reasons to get people involved in both sides of the dice ritual.

Defenses and 4E

As part of our complicated stateside travels, the spouse and I stopped into a friendly local gamestore last night (Fun-n-Games in Blacksburg, VA) and took up an invitation to help make up the four-player quorum in a D&D Encounters session.

I don't think it's a particularly new observation that the Fourth Edition is not The Devil. Indeed, the DM worked a few social skill checks into the lead-up to the combat (defending innocent caravaneers against a flock of stirges) and the system, I think, could be adapted to roleplaying in the classic style with no need for artificial skill challenges. The game does put things out front and center and gives even starting players a wealth of obvious, individual, heroic strategic options, as opposed to having to figure out that in order to survive you must soak a mule in lantern oil, tie a charmed torchbearer to it, and lure the hobgoblin squad back into your ambush point where you roll spiked barrels full of rocks on them. So, it's a beginner-friendly game that more than anything resembles GURPS.

We skulked away clutching our participation prizes, which will be useful as apotropaic repellents should we ever be ambushed by zombified grognards. The Fortune Cards, though, were not as fun to add "in bed" to as fortune cookies.

The 4E system puts the fortitude, reflex and will saving throws on the same mechanical footing as Armor Class (all four are "defenses" against different types of attacks). This does bring up something I have wondered about. In classic D&D, dodging a lightning bolt is a "saving throw" that goes up by level, while dodging a sword swing depends on "armor class" that doesn't go up by level.

This doesn't seem quite right. If anything, the distinction should be between the defensive nature of armor (protects regardless of the wearer's awareness, might not work against beam-type spell effects) and agility (needs awareness and freedom to dodge, but more able to escape spell beams and other metaphysical ills). You can see this ambiguity in how attack-type traps are handled in pre-3rd edition D&D; sometimes a peril like a swinging blade or arrow trap is handled as "survive a hit roll as from a 5th level fighter" while other times it is "save vs. petrification or take 2d8 damage."

The next revision of my own game system will most likely do away with saving throws against physical contact - though things like poison and charm, testing resistance of body or soul itself, will still use them. Instead, effects that depend on physical contact may "ignore armor" (lightning bolts, for example), going against only the dexterity bonus and any magical protections. Or they may include armor (fireballs, for example) and so require some form of hit roll to do full vs. half damage. Dexterity bonuses, of course, will be ignored for unaware, unconscious, or incapacitated victims. This goes hand in hand with my plan to give small dodge-based AC bonuses to rogues (and possibly fighters too) as they go up levels.

I guess the question is, does it matter who rolls the d20 - the bolt caster, or the thief jumping away?

Oh yes, the nonviolence comments inspired me to start work on a whole damn nonviolent adventure generation system, in place of the single nonviolent adventure. That, I swear, will be the next post.