Old School Dungeon Encounter Table

I wasn't happy with any of the options for rolling up dungeon monsters. Strictly from desperation, I stocked the first level of my megadungeon with some heavily fudged use of a 3rd edition encounter web gadget, the kind that gives you dragonforged were-undead goblin rangers with the Mighty Cobra Clutch feat.

So over the months, I went ahead and cobbled up one of my own with a more old-school feel, both in source material, and in coming up with too-big-to-fight encounters every now and then. It has my usual table style - roll 2 keep low, d6:d6 rolls - and it manages to stock the lower levels heavily with Varlets & Vermin monsters. Download from the right. Let me know if it doesn't work; once again I've tried the "download from link only" version in the vain hope that Google Docs will actually work.


If you're interested in hacking it, let me know and I can send you a Word copy.

Hit Points are Player Morale

One more thing left over from my examination of what hit points mean: Players act a lot differently with 30 hit point characters than with 3 hit point ones.

So, in a hit point based gaming system, the HP dictate player morale.

I like to reverse-engineer this fact. Hit points are also character morale. If you play that zero HP or below is a serious physical injury possibly killing you, then any damage prior to that is the wearing down of confidence by near misses and glancing blows. And, as long as you have enough confidence, you just cannot be killed. Welcome to a heroic universe.

This means:

• Failure to regain HP losses when resting in less than optimal conditions makes sense. So does losing HP for staying in such adverse conditions. Inns where you can't bling out to the tune of X Gold Pieces/Level are just not going to restore your pampered morale!
• Magical fear can be modeled - and created in players - by a process of slow but nonlethal wearing down of hit points when in the presence of a terrifying creature or area.
• Clerics don't so much lay on hands most of the time, as restore confidence and will. This might be an argument for same-religion healing bonuses. If going this route there also needs to be a way they can heal serious injuries.
• Zero hit points might be "unconscious" but might also be "whipped and weary."
• Healing surges make total sense!!!! (Okay, forget I said that) How about ... bards can cast area effect cure spells?

How to Rule the Fantastic?

One legitimate question that arises from yesterday's post - as some of my commenters professed their love for systems and worlds in which fantasy is treated in a predictable, rule-driven way - is ...

Isn't the whole enterprise of fantasy gaming about applying rules to a fantastic universe?

Followed immediately by ...

How can people who love the fantastic rather than prosaic find happiness in a rules system?

I don't have a comprehensive answer right now but here are a few tidbits that tend to push rules to the "fantastic" rather than "prosaic" side.

• In 1st edition AD&D, the artifact descriptions with their powers intentionally left blank and to be filled in.
• Any system that replaces mechanistic magic with animistic magic ... where social interactions with magical entities replace mere point-and-fire. Stormbringer's demons, Legend of the Five Rings' elemental kami, and Goodman's Dungeon Crawl Classics with its sorcerous patrons all come to mind.
• The Birthright idea to have mythological monsters like the Chimera or Medusa be hugely powerful one-offs, as in actual Greek mythology, rather than whole species (let alone with an "ecology.")

Any others out there?

The Light Fantastic ... and Eight Other Fantasy Esthetics

Recently I was debating over whether or not to emphasize mundane abilities for wizards, finally making the call against. Then a number of other things blipped across my mental radar. Doing research on the history of D&D encumbrance rules, I flicked open the 2nd Edition Players' handbook for the first time in ages, marvelling at the mundane exactitude of its encumbrance rules and equipment lists. Zak had a long evisceration of a 4th Ed. module with special attention to the muddy art style. Then back to 2nd edition, trying to figure out what exactly galled me about the majority of the art pieces, and why that gall coalesced around the Elmore frontispiece ...

Yeehaw! All 7 feet of it!

Okay, one thing is that it's prosaic. There's actually some sly humor here if you look at it right. The adventurers are cast as a modern-day group of deer hunters or marlin fishers posing with their big prize. They've strung the dragon up - why, exactly? Who's taking the photo? It's a witty anachronism, but one that drags us away from the fantastic nature of dragons, into the realm of weekend warriors and twelve-point bucks.

The other thing that didn't match my gaming esthetic was the lightness of the piece. Not in terms of humor - humor can be dark, too. Rather, what I mean these are clearly a bunch of characters, blessed with 4d6-drop-lowest stats and maximum hit points at creation, who have just ganked what can only be a hatchling green dragon*. For this mighty feat the DM has seen fit to award a shoebox-sized treasure hoard. This piece conveys the exact opposite of "dangerous." The exact opposite of squaring off against a 30 foot high efreeti. The only sign that the party has faced danger are three little claw marks on the trouser leg of the hulking chainmailed fighter.

Call one axis, then, "light/dark". It's defined by danger - in a game system's mechanics and in the game's art. But what's the other axis? Going back to the first gripe, it's the fantastic versus prosaic. This is a hard distinction to define, especially in a genre where everything technically counts as fantastic. Let me throw out some examples that do it for me. In a prosaic fantasy world:

• The plot is motivated by material concerns, like trade routes or dynastic politics. 
• Full encumbrance rules are in effect.
• Magic may be rare or common, but it is normalized and understood, more like a science than an art.
• Character classes have "mundane" skills to go alongside their outstanding abilities.
• The equipment list is long and comprehensive. It illustrates the importance of using and managing material resources.
• The game system works like a textbook, with rules for every conceivable situation no matter how mundane. Halfway to this is the "almanac" apprach taken by first edition AD&D, where various micro-systems are sprinkled throughout as examples for DMs to improvise other material (and the first 10 years of Dragon magazine are packed with just this kind of improvised material).

The full esthetic alignment grid appears below; with "Tough" being in between light and dark (an environment that is difficult and dangerous, but ultimately surmountable through sheer force of will) and "Worlds Collide" being a commonly seen situation where prosaic characters are thrust into a fantastic universe. On it I've distributed a number of game systems and settings according to my overall sense of where they fall.

A couple of observations from this:

1. It's easy now to see why 2nd edition D&D was the way it was. TSR's mass-marketing of D&D, especially the kiddie market, required a diagonal flight from the Weird; a renunciation of the devils (and demons) and all their works. First to go were the BIG RED DEVILS on the core rulebook covers, then the comfy esthetic of 2nd edition followed suit in a big way. An important thing to realize is they didn't actually succeed in making D&D more attractive to kids, who always have reveled in stories, films, and comics full of blood, gore and evil. But they made it more attractive to parents. This is why I liked 2nd edition AD&D when it came out in my early twenties. I was trying hard to be a Grown-Up; the Light Prosaic, with its sober rules and materialistic detail, fit the bill.

2. I can't for the life of me fit 4th edition in here. There may be some kind of disconnection between its visual esthetics and its actual gameplay, though.

3. My current game is in the "Tough/Worlds Collide" sector, edging to Dark. What's your favored mode?


* Yeah, I know, a hatchling green dragon by the Monstrous Compendium has 7 Hit Dice despite being at most 5' long in the body. But that doesn't look like a 7HD monster.

Cleanup on One Page Spells

I guess I should also summarize my commenters' opinions on the higher spell levels, even though they're not going to get the one-page treatment (maybe Advanced One Page Rules will handle them):

Level 4: Polymorph is a big hit, with the suggestion that Self and Other applications be combined into one super-versatile spell. Charm Monster and Dimension Door were the other ones that got multiple votes.

Level 5: Teleport was unanimously chosen, and Animate Dead got multiple votes. I'm not super big on any of the alternatives - Conjure Elemental seems to outclass Animate Dead, although it might be a good substitution if I give necromancy exclusively to evil clerics. Cloudkill, Contact Other Plane, and Transmute Rock to Mud ... The spells get less iconic as the levels rise.

Level 6: As I've said before, this is the last level I'll seriously consider. Stone to Flesh and its reversal were unanimously chosen. Geas was also popular (even if I consider it more of an NPC spell). The rest were singletons, showing the fraying of consensus at these high levels that characters rarely reach.

Oh, and here are the 6 more low level spells I mentioned last time. Lots of spells at level 1 is a good idea, but after that, my brotha, you have to find your own...

Don't Lab Me In

My path of thinking up until yesterday ran as follows:

Mr. Wizard

* Several of the classic magic-user spells can be duplicated by more mundane, "scientific" activities like research in a lab, digging in a library, or just straight up buying stuff. Why throw a low-grade damage spell when you can throw a dart? Why cast Mount when you can buy a horse? You can research, replacing Identify and Comprehend Languages; dowse, replacing Detect Magic; throw oil, pour acid, spread grease ...
* So it would make sense that if wizards are to have "at will" skills, they should be mundane skills like research or alchemy, while spells are restricted per day or effectively per encounter.
* Most of these abilities would require some kind of base like a library or laboratory, which the character could borrow from an established wizard at first, and work up to owning their own.
* The skills would automatically succeed in this base, or at least only fail on a very low chance. The wizard could also try to use the skills in the field at a lower chance of success; trying to remember how that ancient script goes, for example.

This would lead to a vision of the low-level magic user as a dart-throwing, horse-buying, half-mundane scholar; a scientist-wizard, as in historical medieval times when the realms of science, magic and medicine were not all that distinct. Very "Forgotten Realms, " Greenwoodian realism, the kind of thing that appealed to me in the fantasy settings of the 90's.

But the more problems I had implementing this, the more I started to kick against the very idea. The One Page idea doesn't have space to mess around. Its character classes need to shine in bold, distinct primary colors, not "realistic" but drab mud-hues.

Put this in your lab and smoke it!

The hell is SCIENCE? You want me to MIX CHEMICALS IN A LAB? Screw that! A wizard does everything by magic. He lights his pipe with his thumb. Has a minor demon do the dishes. Magic upholds her very costuming, in most cases! (see illustration)

And on top of that, your wizard is an adventurer. Can't be tied down to a lab for too long. Even renting out a lab in each new town is a bit too much of a chore. That kind of mundane stuff is for other people to do, and for adventurers to pay for in rich yellow coin looted from a moldering tomb.

So instead of lab abilities, I've decided to add one page of low level spells, and just increase the number of spells available per day. That's coming up next, along with a specific mini-debate about the Identify spell.

Did I make the right call?

The Real Merit Badges

I hear there's an old school movement to give out merit badges to dungeon masters. Man, I dunno Stuart, I don't think my players are ready for the truth about how I roll.

Unknown, baby

Besides, I dug up all these badges from back in the day when I was gunning for Eagle Scout and a high school Dungeon Master.