Easy Rule for Broken Arrows

Among the logistics of adventure gaming that I currently handwave is the depletion of arrows and other missile ammo. In practice it's too tedious, forgettable, and character-sheet-messy to cross off every arrow (and pick them up again).

So, if there is a thing that people are supposed to do, and they don't do it, and you think it adds to the play of the game, it's on you as the rules hacker/designer to make it easy. I think as long as people are buying arrows in lots of 12 or 20 they should pay attention to depletion. But until now I haven't come up with an easy rule that makes some kind of sense.

So happy, sucking up all your ammo.

Here it is:

1. If an arrow or crossbow bolt does damage but does not kill its target, cross it off; in effect it gets stuck in there and broken off by the still-alive creature. Sling bullets are hardier, so do not suffer this fate.
2. If the party flees the scene of a combat without time to rest and pick up missiles, anyone who shot missiles crosses off two if the fight was short, five if the fight was long, and more for epic fights. If a player thinks this is too many, they are free to keep track of their missiles one by one.

If your players are marking down TWELVE ARROWS or TWENTY ARROWS IN QUIVER, they can just cross off letters from those phrases as ammo gets depleted. Same goes for TWENTY BULLETS IN POUCH and TWENTY QUARRELS IN CASE.

Ammo Made Easy: Three Left on 3

Inspired by the cascading dice rule from Intwischa, but not really wanting to add another die roll to make it happen, I offer this way to track ammo in a d20 based game without tracking ammo, without rolling extra dice, and without the surrealism of "Surprise, you run out right now!"

• Assuming you start with a package of 16-20 ammo-bits, if you roll a 3 or 13 on the d20 to hit, you are down to 3 ammo-bits in that package until you can buy more ammo.
• You can't run out if you roll a 3 or 13 in the first three shots of your first encounter after stocking ammo.
• This assumes you're not retrieving missiles ... I guess it's not too much complication to say you run down only on a 3 if you retrieved missiles after the last battle, otherwise you run down on both numbers.

Together with some ideas for special missile weapon fumbles, I reckon this might justify one page in the Next 52. What do you think?

Wunderkammer Drinking Games

Another neat thing we saw in the new Rijksmuseum: a room of cups used in 17th century drinking games.

Dice cup

DICE CUP: Like many drinking cups, this has no base, so that it can not be set down while full. Instead, at the bottom of the cup is a round cage with a die in it. The point of the game is simple: shake the empty cup, then drain it a number of times equal to the number on the die.

SPINNER CUP: This cup has a spinner built into the stem. Whosoever the spinner points to must drink from the cup. A game that is not entirely forgotten.

Measure glass

MEASURE GLASS: The "pasglas" or measure glass is a clear cylinder with three to five marks along its side. The object is to fill the glass and drain one of the compartments exactly, no more, no less. Failure means you must drink from the next compartment, and so on.

How would I rule a drinking game in an old school system? Each basic "drink" is 1 pint of beer or cider = 1 large glass of wine = double shot of distilled spirits.

Drinking skill doesn't match well with adventuring levels, so I would just use the ad hoc "tiny competence" system and have everyone roll a d6 (+2 if a dwarf, automatic 6 if an appropriate background such as "tavern keeper"). on a 1 you are a lightweight and must make two d20+CON >= 20 rolls after each drink, on a 2 you are a heavyweight and make one such roll after every two drinks, everyone else makes one roll per drink. Failure moves you one step down the track:

0: Not Drunk: You are fine.
1: Tipsy: -1  penalty to all rolls involving skill
2: Drunk: -2 penalty and -3 move
3: Legless: -5 penalty and -6 move. If you failed on a natural 10 or less, vomit, losing 1 drink from your system.
4: Unconscious. Recover in 2d4 hours.

Sleight of hand may be used to try to manipulate the die or the spinner, and the measure glass can be set as a d20 + WIS >= 20 task.

The Most Unnecessary Magic Item

DUST OF APPEARANCE

Gold value: 1800 gp

Function: Reveals invisible monsters and visual illusions in a 10 foot radius.


5 POUND BAG OF FLOUR

Gold value: $2.50

Function: Reveals invisible monsters and visual illusions in a 10 foot radius. Also, biscuits. Pancakes.

CONCLUSION

Don't breathe in the dust of appearance because it must get you high as nuts.

One Page Dogs and Horses

I figured the 52 Pages needed this one. At the level 1-3 stage it's boiled down to the obvious adventuring needs, cavalry steeds for your foes, and a handful of dungeon-fodder trap-trippers. As always, some silhouettes courtesy of Telecanter, and relative prices checked with my existing price lists and the Medieval Prices guide (where one of my sp = 5 historical pence).

Broken Arrows

By coincidence, I had been thinking about one of the logistic aspects of the game this week that I seem to blow off in my campaigns - keeping track of ammo. Then Talysman writes about it so I feel I should share my thoughts.

Are most people overestimating how many arrows would be lost in combat, given enough time to recover them afterwards as part of the ten minute post-combat rest? This blog has 50% attrition, Talysman has 33%. It doesn't look like too many arrows would be broken even shooting against armor (here) so the main source of loss would be sticking in the wound and being broken off, being trodden on in combat, or just disappearing into the distance. It may be useful to overestimate these occurrences, though, if only to have ammo supplies play a meaningful part in an adventure.

Also topical for Valentine's Day.

In battlefield combat, of course, there is the factor of not wanting your enemy to easily pull out arrows or use them back against you, that led some historical archers to use arrows with the point intentionally loosened. Most of what adventurers are fighting, though, won't have bows themselves. The option can be given to loosen heads if needed, but it seems more important to explorers to be able to conserve arrow stores.

Here are a couple of ideas:

1. Track ammo supplies using toothpicks stuck in a piece of modeling clay, packing sponge, or styrofoam (personally I hate the sound of squeaking styrofoam so that's right out.) Pull your "arrows" out when you shoot them and turn them in if they break or are abandoned. Indicate special arrows (magic, silver, etc.) using marker on the tip.

2. Arrows, magic or otherwise, break immediately on a natural damage roll of 6; I also have a missile fumble that breaks the arrow. Otherwise, there is no need to have a fiddly "realistic" system or extra dice rolls to model what is ultimately just another aspect of logistics like food, water, and light source consumption. So, breakage and loss are abstracted after the combat; each archer loses 1 out of every 4 arrows shot, rolling d4 to see if there is any loss when a fraction of that is shot. If the party flees the battlefield, of course, losses are total. Magic arrows can be exempted from this due to superior construction, although they may be picked up by intelligent foes.

3. Arrow heads can be loosened to become unusable after any hit (including a hit that would connect with an unarmored target even if it missed due to armor) and 3/4 unrecoverable.

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.

Let's Go Shopping

The availability modifiers refer back to the system on my settlements page. If rolling dice and bookkeeping is too much of a pain you can just say anything with a total availability less than 3 is not available in a particular place.

Anything adventurers would like to buy that I've left off? (Well, I know they'd like to buy a .50 cal machine gun and tote it around on an ankylosaurus, but you know what I mean.)

One Page Settlements

This starts a series of pages on equipment and urban opportunities. The present page is a kind of master key that categorizes settlemenst and introduces the mechanics of availability; I've gone back to my weapon,armor and follower pages and worked up availability modifiers for those. Coming up are a couple of pages of equipment.

The one thing I'm happiest about is the repurposing of the urban encounter in terms of what is happening to the players, rather than "You have an encounter with a perfumed dandy and three linkboys" and so on. Reaction rolls can still make a difference, but this will be in terms of the conditions of what's proposed or offered. The modifiers mean that small fish in big ponds will mostly be dealing with peasants and lowlife, while any decent level party of adventurers will immediately start getting invitations (friendly or otherwise) from the authorities if they roll into a little village. I may also provide, later, an optional chart for determining exactly what kind of high or low citizen is involved in the encounter.

Luxury Shopping

Who says leather armor has to be cheap?

If the standard ratio of experience from monsters and treasures in most early versions of D&D tends to oversupply the characters with treasure, what can they spend it on that's satisfying?

Let's leave out the advice of Gygax in the DMG to soak the players with taxes and training fees - which turns the game into an unsatisfying caricature of bureaucratic capitalism, denying the players the freedom of a robber-baron frontier. What remains are two economic phases. In the first phase, players complete their character's acquisition of the best equipment available for adventuring. In the second phase, they get more ambitious and spend on things that establish them in the game world, ultimately leading up to a stronghold.

The problem in many rule sets is that phase 1 is very short, with an excess of treasure and a shortage of expensive things to buy.  We saw previously that in some rulesets, the amouint of coinage amassed getting to level 2 alone can buy several suits of plate armor. In my current games I've succumbed to the temptation to have a bigger and better equipment list. Potions of healing ("vitality" because they only restore the metaphysical character hit points rather than actual physical injury) can be had, reducing the absolute need to bring a "healer" along. Armor and weapons for a steep multiplier can be had in dwarven or elven steel, which  give limited bonuses, less than the magical versions of those things. Spellcasters need to spend money to inscribe new spells in their books. Eventually mounts, camping supplies, boats and ships may be bought.

All this time the players are supposed to be saving up for their stronghold. A second problem arises - the road to settled status tends to be a dull process, with a long mid-level haul before the ultimate payoff. I'm looking to the next generation of old-school games to make this progression a little more interesting, with more subsidiary goals along the way. If anyone knows whether Adventurer Conqueror King makes good on this, I'd like to know. I have a few ideas toward this goal, and also see an inherent problem in the stronghold goal, but that's a whole separate post.

My estimate is that after 3rd or 4th level or so, adventurers should have enough cash to buy all the equipment they can reasonably buy on the market, and around then should start adventuring for items of power and increased respect in society. The game system should then be designed around this, with an intricate balancing of experience, cash, levels of equipment. I guess as people level up in my game it'll remain to be seen whether my house-rules are doing the job. Anyway, those are now getting into good shape so I'll post some of them up as One Pagers throughout this week, with commentary.

Starting Equipment Kit Cards

In my last few runs of the One Page system, I could feel time dragging as players (some completely inexperienced, some very savvy) waded through the equipment list to select stuff. I want to get it down to 15 minutes or so. Sure, I could use pre-gens, but part of the reason to have super-simple character options is to give the experience of rolling up a character.

This is just the six standard packages of adventuring gear I let characters start with for free, in card format.  I see this as making set-up much quicker. The cards make it obvious that the job is to distribute all the standard adventuring gear and backups among the party.

Weapons, etc. coming up next.

Character Birth: Choice vs. Speed

Count me on the side of quick with a few choices rather than slow with a lot of choices, when it comes to generating characters for adventure games.

My One Page system cuts out an element of choice - not without some controversy as I recall -  by having class determined directly by stats which can, if necessary, be switched around once. It works choice back in, though in a relatively light way, by allowing open-ended selection of background descriptors that can have some effect on when skills work best.

Oh yeah, I changed the skills sheet some so that languages and backgrounds could fit in.  I am pretty happy now with the way backgrounds are a kind of "adjective" or "subject" that modify the base chance that the very generic skill gives you. You only get to use Knowledge to remember facts that are part of your background, and if you try using most skills in a setting or task consistent with your background you get a +2 on that (these are indicated on the new version of the character sheet, below).

I've noticed recently, though, that character generation with this system tends to bog down around skill and equipment selection.

The solution for equipment is to have random tables for weapons and standard starting armor, and to pass around a deck of cards with the six equipment packages so that the party as a whole is adequately equipped for their first expedition. That's for a future post ...

The solution for skills was simple. As I had it, players were "choosing" only a pip or two of skills to shift around their character sheet. So why not just have skills also flow from class and stats - keeping in mind that the flavor and scope of each skill in my system is modified by the freely chosen background descriptors ...

Anyway, this is what's going on the end of this sheet now.

At this point I'm a little overwhelmed by the multi-ring circus I've got going on in my free time, what with the One Page system ( a little stalled out, as I got done what I needed to run a few games with it, so the impulse to complete is kind of dormant for now ), the Genre Worlds tables, Zak giving the high sign for the Obstacles & Openings cards, and even more, including some contributions to other people's product and a big slow secret project. It will all come complete in the fullness of time, I guess.

One Page Equipment, Weapons, Armor

As promised, for those following along at home. Probably the one page of these that's most "detachable" from the system is the equipment page. I find that this distribution of the standard adventurer equipment into six little packages really speeds up preparation for one-shot dungeon crawls. It would be even nicer, I guess, if each equipment package was represented on a separate card...

Fantastic Torch

Amid this amusing series of Photoshopped ads for products only ever seen in movies, behold this dungeon delver staple:

by BRWombat

It's true, even Middle Ages movie torches always go up like they're soaked in gasoline; stay lit forever; are found in sconces without much thought as to who put them there or changes them every two hours or so; and aren't really necessary due to ambient illumination. Yes, the movies are one place where low-tech is better, as we find out further on down the list ...

by Corey Vaspasiano

Tales of the 11 Foot Pole

The lead-in to last night's Trossley run:

• The collapsible *11* foot pole ( sections of 3, 4 and 4 feet) the party had commissioned from the ten-foot-pole magnate was finally ready.
• Every megadungeon has to have rival adventurers, and the first ones arrived in town. A down-on-their luck couple with a dog, a baby, and some scavenged weapons of poor quality, I fully expected pathos and tragedy to ensue. What happened? Read on...

The new wizard, Jessera, showed a tactical bent as she urged the party to "secure the back area" and investigate the other doors leading from the entry room before pressing deeper into the dungeon. Going north found a room with murals of the Archmage's troops marching forward, and exiting the far door caused an odd, nervous feeling in the dwarf that went away as the party decided to turn around and try the south door. This led to an ineffective crossbow trap, a brick-constructed area with rooms formerly dedicated to storing foodstuffs, and a left turn into... an encounter with some kobolds, dressed as the well-guarding kobolds had been in the scraps of the Archmage's livery and armor!

Jessera's sleep spell once more left none to tell the tale, but the party was interrupted in the midst of throat-slitting by a Common-speaking representative of another kobold tribe who had taken over the well after the party had slaughtered its defenders. This "Yurog" tribe claimed to be peaceful and urged the party to strike south against the warlike "Amrash." Both dwarf and militant had their own reasons to just want to kill kobolds, but discretion won the day and the Yurog representative was sent back with news of the party's willingness to truce.

Further exploration, using the pole to open, prod, and keep at bay, netted only a fight with some centipedes and a hoard of coins sewn into a mattress. Some of my rolling behind the scenes revealed to me events that led to a loud marching and intimidating battle cries of "Am-rash!" being heard approaching from the south. Feeling naked without their sleep spell, and also succumbing to player fatigue (it had been a long week), the adventurers retreated to count their money and experience.

And the luckless couple? I'd determined they would try to clean up an area of towers in the upper works the party had not fully explored. They squashed a black widow spider with extremely lucky dice rolls, and it was guarding a decent treasure too ... Thus when the party got back to the Duck and Whistle they saw the lucky couple eating a fine meal, swilling ale, bouncing the baby, and declaring their early retirement from the adventuring game.

Meanwhile, the dungeon shifts ... the kobold wars continue ... intrigue and infamy await!

We Have Fuligin

Fans of Gene Wolfe's magnificent Book of the New Sun far-future novels will recall that the traditional color of the Guild of Torturers was fuligin - a fictional light-absorbing hue blacker than black.

It now exists.

I think that almost makes up for the now shaky scientific basis of Wolfe's technology for transferring memories from person to person.

If you want fuligin cloaks or garments in a D&D game, you will have to visit one of the Underdark's disreputable bazaars, bringing with you at least 1000 gold pieces worth of treasure; or take them from those few underground elves who have learned to weave elemental darkness into spider silk. Covering your body near-completely with fuligin, with black masks or veils over one's face, black gloves, and all equipment painted black, gives a +4 on d20/+20%/+1 on d6 for hiding in shadows. Wearing fuligin in public will attract awe, fear and no small amount of attention.