Singular Curiosities

This is a repost of an older blog entry because 

a) someone asked me to bring it back

and

b) Aos made this great post on his blog and I think it fits well with what he was talking about.

There is something to be said for games with very simple, fast character creation. Systems with a small number of classes are usually great for this; you just pick one, roll some dice, make a few choices, and you’re ready to go. 

However, the unfortunate side-effect of that kind of simplicity is often a feeling that every character of that class is essentially the same. A starting thief in B/X D&D is pretty much the same as every other starting thief–you might have slightly different ability scores or different equipment load-out, but things are what they are.

Yes, you can make characters feel different through back-story and role-play, but that’s not what I’m on about here.

What about adding on something small, "mechanical," flavorful, and player-defined, that makes characters feel different in practice?

Here’s my attempt for Beyond the Wall’s three basic classes. (It would work for various retro-clones as well.) To give each character in the game a bit of differentiation, I’m stealing a page from 13th Age’s One Unique Thing and a bit of inspiration from the BtW playbooks: each player gets to write down a Singular Curiosity that is something special about their character not covered by the usual rules:

Singular Curiosity: Write down one thing that is peculiar to your character, something that differentiates them from the people around them. See below for some examples you can choose from or use as the inspiration for your own.

Singular Curiosities
• Your senses are linked to those of a loyal animal companion.
• Your dhampir lineage allows you to see perfectly in the dark.
• You have made a dark pact with an eldritch entity; each day you may ask the entity three questions and expect reasonably truthful answers.
• You are haunted by the ghost of an executed murderer. Once per day you can allow the specter to possess you; when it does, it gives you +2 to hit with melee attacks and damage, but afterward you suffer a -2 penalty to all rolls for the rest of the day.
• You were kissed by a dryad; once per day you may step into a tree and emerge out of another tree you are familiar with.
• Your father gave you a silver chain that has the power to bind witches.
• Your pilgrimage to an ancient shrine has blessed you with a miraculous resistance to disease.
• You carry your grandmother’s enchanted sword; it does +1 damage and will fly to your hand if you will it.
• Your master taught you how to cut spirits using a regular blade.
• You bear a special enmity against a type of supernatural creature; you get a +1 bonus to hit that creature and can sense when they are nearby.
• You have a profound connection to the spirit world and can converse with the recently deceased.
• Your photographic memory allows you to memorize any map you see with a stunning degree of accuracy.
• You have a face that is always missed in a crowd (when you want it to be).
• Your clockwork heart makes you immune to poison.
• You can still remember the things you learned in your past life.
• Your tattoos alter daily, revealing cryptic clues as to the things yet to come.
• You have access to a personal library that seems to have a volume on every imaginable subject.
• You are a changeling and the fairy folk are apt to give you respect. You have +2 Charisma when dealing with the fae.
• Your family follows the Old Ways; once per day you can transform into the form of an animal, such as a wolf, bear, or hawk.
• Your childhood in the slums has made your fists as deadly as a knight’s sword.
• Your grandfather gave you a key that opens all simple locks.
• You are a talking bear. Your claws do 1d8 damage and your AC is naturally 13, but you have trouble using your paws as hands.  

Firearm Problems in Old-School and 5e D&D

Old-school D&D is a pretty abstract game when it comes to the mechanics of combat (see, for example, hit points, armor class, the functional similarity of dissimilar weaponry), and yet when it comes time to introduce black powder firearms suddenly people start talking about using different damage dice versus specific armor types, period-accurate reload times, and translating the peculiarities of smooth bores vs. rifling, to say nothing of detailed comparisons of matchlock and flintlock firing mechanisms.

Suddenly a game that privileges ease of play over realism is bogged down in a mire of special properties, edge cases, and bolted-on house rules that seem at odds with the base system.

Lamentations of the Flame Princess is a pretty good example of this effect in action. LotFP is a game content to abstract melee options. It doesn't have a big detailed chart of everything you can use to bludgeon or stab someone to death with in the game; instead, weapons are ranked great, medium, minor, or small, and you're left to fluff them accordingly. 

(There are a few weird outliers, like the cestus, polearm, and spear which have some special-case rules, but generally things are kept simple and consistent rather than realistic and detailed.)

And then you get to the firearms appendix and all that simplicity and consistency flies out the window. Now you've got bullet-pointed lists of special rules for firing mechanisms (with asterisked exceptions), gun and barrel types, and any firearm accessories with mechanical add-ons (such as apostles) that you're bringing to the party. 

My own firearm rules back when I was playing Labyrinth Lord had moments of being equally as convoluted and contrary to the free-wheeling spirit of the rules. At various points I had bespoke rules about range and reloading based on some way-too-intensive research, exploding damage dice rules, etc. It was a mess and it added nothing good to my games.

Instead of coming up with new cruft to add to the game, I should have taken inspiration from Erik Jensen and just used the rules for ranged weapons that already exist in the game. At the level of abstraction that most old-school D&D games default to, you're just better off using the stats of bows or crossbows and reskinning the fictional aesthetics of the weapon than detailing all sorts of new rules to make it "realistic." John Bell gets it. Brian Mathers gets it. 

5e D&D has somewhat of the opposite problem. Firearm rules are buried in an optional section of the Dungeon Master's Guide (267-268). Generally, the rules are pretty simple: the black powder firearms follow the rules already extant for crossbows, except they do a bit more damage. More modern firearms also have similarly efficient rules for their use. No problem, right?

Well, no, not exactly. Since they aren't part of the default game assumptions, they don't really interact well with things like special abilities or feats. If you use them as-is, there's no real reason to pick a firearm over a crossbow; if you start house ruling to make similar feats available for firearms, there's no reason to use anything but a firearm because their damage is just plain better.

Oddly, the solution to 5e's problem is the same as the solution to the old-school problem outlined above: just use the stats for crossbows, since they are already integrated into the game, and refluff the descriptive fiction as black powder firearms. A heavy crossbow could certainly be ye olde arquebus, a light crossbow could be ye olde musket, and the hand crossbow could be ye olde pistol. You don't have to invent rules about which class is proficient with which; just look to see which crossbows they can already use with proficiency and apply it to firearms as well. You don't have to come up with new feats; change the wording to Crossbow Expert and you're good to go.

That Time I Fixed the B/X Thief

Straight up: the thief sucks in B/X D&D. It's the only class that is actually bad at its core shtick. 

But we can fix that. Above you see the rather baroque and over-complicated division of thief ability scores and their chance of success per level. My advice: just use the Hear Noise column for all Activities Thiefly in Nature.

This also means that you can assign a 1 in 6 chance of success to non-thieves trying to do Thiefly Stuff.

Sorted.

(This was an old idea I had from years ago that someone asked to see again, so here it is, posted for posterity.)

Emotional Shit

SPOILER ALERT FOR LotFP's FUCK FOR SATAN 

There is a chamber in Fuck For Satan’s dungeon in which the characters magically shit their pants and then have to fight their own turds:

This seemingly empty, featureless cell contains a disembodied consciousness which can only possess the excrement of living beings. When the cell door is opened, the being will immediately be in the guts of every living creature present, causing severe debilitating pain as the being forces stomach acid through the intestinal tract (certain chemical properties of the acid is what allows the being to propel the resulting mass), and in two rounds all within the area will vacate their bowels. Each combination of piss and shit, even though possessing one collective consciousness, will act independently. 

Yeah, that is a thing that happens in the adventure. 

I’m not offended or shocked by the above, but I do think it is a lazy and dumb attempt to be offensive and shocking.

Nevertheless, we can think metaphorically about this shit-stirring room instead of thinking on a literal level where you are attacked by the shit your carry in your body. Think about all the other shit we carry around in our daily lives: the petty concerns, the haunting memory of past failures, our anxieties about the health and happiness of our families, the barely-repressed traumas that always already lurk on the edges of our psyches. What if entering the chamber caused that shit to pour out of the characters and coalesce into a monster to be combated? 

Isn’t that at least a little more weird and interesting than "I hit my poo for 2 points of damage"?

This variation on the encounter would work best if the characters have developed back-stories through play. I would describe the "shit" differently to each player based on the mental and emotional burdens their character carries from past adventures, or as something pulled from their background that has figured into the campaign in a meaningful way. Hell, since these are adventurers we’re talking about, you should have plenty to work with. 

Sure, my hack of the shitmonster isn’t genius stuff, but I think you’ve got to admit that confronting your own psychological baggage is a hell of a lot more in tune with the Lovecraftian "we are insignificant specks doomed by our own cosmic irrelevance" trope than wrecking your trousers.

How to Make Characters in Modern D&D for Old-School Players

I’ve seen a lot of old-school gamers complain that making a Pathfinder or 3e D&D or 4e D&D or 5e D&D character is too hard or requires too much work compared to old-school editions. They’d rather not have to make all those decisions about feats, skills, powers, etc. or even buy in to the system mastery needed to know what the good choices are; it would be better if you just got set things each level like in the earlier editions.

I can sympathize with that, to a degree. I don’t want to read 20 pages of feats either to pick out which one my 1st level character gets either. But then again, this is 2016 and the internet has already done the heavy lifting for you.

I’m here to help.

Let me show you how.

As you can see, if you do a search for just about any Pathfinder or 3e or 4e or 5e character class + "builds" or "guide" you will get a highly-detailed guide on how to make such a character. Just treat the "build" as a class where what you get is spelled out in advance each level. When you hit level 2, don’t worry about reading through all the feats to pick a good one–just go with the one spelled-out in the build document. The people who write those treat it like it’s a calling, so you aren’t likely to get burned.

Letting the internet make all the choices for you takes all the work out of it; now you can get on to the part you presumably like: killing goblins and collecting loot. Or maybe role-playing a character. Whatever you’re into.

My point is this: Pathfinder or 3e or 4e or 5e might not be your favorite editions, hell, you might even hate them, but if you get a chance to play with some cool people don’t let "It will be a drag to make a character" or "This edition isn’t my favorite one" be the things that stop you. That goes double for "Well, I only like playing D&D."

Personally, I’d rather play with people who are cool using a system that isn’t my favorite than with a system that I prefer and people who are terrible. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

Just Use Bears

So, the characters in your old-school D&D game go somewhere you haven’t yet prepared and you describe some cool, weird-ass monster that you don’t actually have stats for: "At the bottom of the Bone Pit of the Succulent Orb a vast form rises from the sinkhole; its reptilian body glistens with antediluvian slime and its pteroid jaw opens, revealing rows of serrated fangs in what appears to be a most unholy welcome." In situations likes these, I just use the stats for a bear and no one is the wiser. Re-skin appearance, methods of attack, and add special abilities on the fly if you absolutely must...but when in doubt, just use bears.

Death Frost Doom and the Chrono-crone

This is a repost of an old post of mine because Justin from Dragons Gonna Drag asked for it to come back. I take requests.

Death Frost Doom is one of those modules that has the potential to be a very memorable adventure, but needs a bit of modification to suit my style of play.

One of the things I like least about it (and this is a pretty minor part of the overall adventure) is the magical clock found within the cabin leading up to the accursed temple. The clock is described thusly in the first version of Death Frost Doom (I haven't read the newer rewrite of it; every time I try I just get sidetracked by how awesome Jez Gordon's art in it is): 

The clock is magical; anyone physically moving the hands forward or backward will cause a time distortion. The distortion affects only the person moving the clock hands; if two or more people try to do it at the same time, randomly determine which is affected. Moving the clock backwards will stop time for that same amount of time, and the character will be able to freely act. Objects will only move if the character moves them, so it would be possible to do things such as walk between raindrops, drop a coin, take a walk, eat a meal, and come back and catch it before it has fallen an inch (provided enough time was moved on the clock to do such things). Other people and animals and undead things will be frozen in time, unable to act. Spirits will still be active, so sleeping on the grounds will have the same effect as normal. Adjusting the clock forward puts the character forward in time by the moved amount. That character will seem to disappear if anyone is watching, and will only reappear after the set amount of time, at which point everyone other than the clock-disturber will not be aware that any time has passed at all.

What I find problematic about the clock, especially if it is adjusted forward, is that it effectively splits the party and creates a headache for the GM who now must run two adventures along two divergent timelines. (It’s also one of the many effects in LotFP adventures that makes the players less apt to touch anything that seems ”weird,” which seems contrary to the point of ”Weird Fantasy.”)

My hack for this is simple: moving the hands on the clock cause the room to suddenly go dark...an outline of a door appears against a wall in fearful luminescence...and out of that unholy portal steps...THE CHRONO-CRONE.

Chrono-crone Hag
Chrono-crones are women whose appearance is bifurcated lengthwise down their bodies; the left half of their bodies is withered and old, while the right half of their bodies is youthful and blooming. Chrono-crones are often magically linked to enchanted clocks. If the clock is tampered with—for example, if the hands of the clock are moved manually—the room first goes black, is then filled with eerie, spectral light, and then the Chrono-chrome appears. Chrono-crones summoned in this way will offer to strike a bargain with a group of adventurers, such as providing the effects of a Haste or Time Stop spell when they most need it, because any tampering with the orderly flow of time does honors their
strange, otherworldly masters.

Move: 120’ (40’) AC: 14 HD: 10 Attacks: 2 (AB +10) Dam:1d4 (claw) Mor: 6
Special Abilities:
Stasis Touch – anyone hit by a Chrono-crone’s claw attack must make a successful Saving Throw vs. Petrify or be struck with a
Hold Person effect.
Mistress of Time – A Chrono-crone can cast Haste and Slow at will,
Passwall, Dimension Door, and Teleport three times per day, and Time Stop twice per day.

* * *
The way I play it, the encounter with the Chrono-crone isn’t about combat unless the players force the issue. (At which point they’ll likely be slaughtered given the crone’s magical abilities.) Instead, it’s a chance to tempt the players into a Faustian bargain: perhaps the crone will offer to use one of her abilities to the party’s favor in return for a little of their "time" (effectively taking some of their youth). The first time I ran Death Frost Doom the players called about the crone to cast some much-needed Haste and Dimension Door spells so they could make good their escape from the zombie hordes.

Of course, the characters are free to not enter into a bargain with the crone. The last time I ran Death Frost Doom the players politely declined the crone’s bargain at first, but made a bee-line for her as soon as they had the vampire in tow in his casket. They made a case to the crone that the vampire’s eternal life was an affront to the flow of time to get her to deal with the vampire so they didn’t have to–which I thought was quite clever, actually.

Weapon Skills for Old-School Fighters

Fighters in old-school D&D are powerful, but they're mechanically pretty dull. You get...better at hitting stuff, and better at avoiding death and dismemberment. That's it.

This is one potential way to make them more interesting and adding nuance to how they play in combat.

You know how "specialists" in LotFP have skills that you can improve by filling in pips on six-sided dice as they level up? What if fighters had weapon skills--that only they have access to--based on the properties of whatever weapon they happened to be using?

It would work like this: when you roll a d20 to make an attack role with your fighter, you also roll a d6 for their weapon skill at the same time. If the d20 indicates a hit and the d6 roll is equal to or less than the number of pips they have in the corresponding weapon skill, the attack is a hit and deals damage, plus the weapon's special property comes into play.

Some examples of possible weapon skills/properties:

Assail -- when this weapon property activates you can make a second attack against the same foe, but you do not get to roll your weapon skill die for this bonus attack. 
Weapons that might have this property: dagger, sling, quarterstaff

Brutal -- when this weapon property activates you can roll twice for damage against your foe and take the higher result.
Weapons that might have this property: battle axe, maul, claymore

Defend -- when this weapon property activates your armor class improves by one point until the start of your next turn.
Weapons that might have this property: poleaxe, dueling sword, main gauche

Hack -- when this weapon property activates you get a +2 bonus to your next attack against the same foe.
Weapons that might have this property: sword, axe, falchion

Stagger -- when this weapon property activates you cause your foe to drop one spot lower in initiative order. (I'm assuming d6 per side initiative.) If your foe's initiative drops below 1, it is stunned for one round and must roll initiative again on its next turn.
Weapons that might have this property: flail, mace, warhammer

Weaken -- when this weapon property activates your foe's armor class gets worse by one point.
Weapons that might have this property: spear, planson, longbow

I'd assume that fighter's start with one pip in each weapon skill, since they're trained in using all weaponry. Not sure about the rate they should gain pips to spend on improving those skills yet; this is all untested material in the spitballing stage.

Prior Experience and Customizing Characters

Character creation in old-school systems is elegantly simple, but aside from your dice rolls characters of the same class are likely to be more or less mechanically the same. Character creation in newer systems tend to be a bit more involved (with several decision points built into the process), but that degree of customization means making a character takes more time. 

Below is my attempt at a "Goldilocks" solution: assume an OSR game like LotFP as the base, but this adds some quick options at character creation to differentiate characters at the outset:

Prior Experience To account for your character's experience prior to becoming an adventurer, customize them by choosing two items from the list below. You can pick the same benefit twice, if you like.

Esoteric Arts – Pick a 1st level spell; your character can cast this spell once per day.

Hardened – You get an extra die's worth of hit points plus Constitution modifier.

Resilient – You get +1 to saving throws.

Sharpened – Add +1 to your attack bonus.

Skilled – Add +1 to a skill of your choice.

Special Snowflake – Want a special ability not covered by the regular rules? Tell me what you've got in mind and we can probably work something out.

Windfall – You get another 3d6x10 silver pieces of wealth to spend or save as you see fit.

Five Things to Do with Isle of the Unknown

Five things to do with a book you bought, looked at, and said "Oh, this seems curiously empty. Great cover though."

Pokecrawl
The characters go hex to hex catching the Pokemon-like monsters on the island; the Zodiac wizards are the Gym Leaders to be defeated; the clerics are helpful trainers; the statues are ways to access the Pokedex.

Wizard Fighter II: Super Turbo
The wizards on the island have all come to the island to do battle with each other, Magic: the Gathering-style, but the rules of engagement state that they cannot leave their chosen territory. This means that they compete with each other by vying for agents to sabotage and attack the others. That’s where the characters come in: who will they ally themselves with, and what reward is offered? Will they betray their patron if a better offer comes along, or do they fight for some higher ideal?

Weird Game Hunt
The characters are big game hunters exploring an uncivilized island, looking to bag some freakish trophies to mount in the ancestral manor. This probably isn't the most politically-correct idea in our post-Cecil moment. Mix in some of H. Rider Haggard's She for kicks.

Ritualis Interruptus
The wizards have all come to the island to perform a great magical working that requires them to complete a vast ritual in concert with each other ; their positions on the island all relate to a web of ley lines. However, there is some Ancient Evil that wants to prevent the beneficent ritual from happening. That’s where the characters come in: how will they safeguard all of those wizards from attack by the minions of the Ancient Evil?

Missionaries in a Pagan Land
The clerics on the island are all missionaries who are bringing the light of the One True Religion to the pagan isle. Cut off from the homeland, the clerics are counting on the characters to deliver much-needed supplies (bibles, food, weapons--maybe not in that order) to counter the pernicious influence of the isle's powerful pagan leaders (the Zodiac wizards, naturally). The statues are pagan idols (or perhaps the earthly manifestation of the pagan gods themselves) to be toppled and destroyed. Win hearts and minds, or bring religion with fire and sword--your choice!