Improving 52 Pages: Fighter and Rogue Combat Powers

Part of developing the 52 Pages Next, the Expert-like rules extension for my game, involves coming up with alternate powers (feats, whatever) for fighters and rogues as well as what they can do at 5th level. Well, here they are:

It bears repeating my design philosophy here: powers should add effects without adding decisions that slow down play. Most of them are either straight bonuses,consequences on things that happen anyway in combat, or "cool things that happen on this die roll." I find this is vital so as not to slow down the pace of Basic-derived D&D, where the tactical decisions should be less "which power should I use now" and more "how do I position myself and use weapons to best advantage?"

As I prepare for converting my existing Band of Iron players to the very latest version of 52 Pages - they've been playing the 2011 version for some time now - I realize that they've grown very fond of their Whirlwind and Quickshot feats - they really light up when they roll a 5 or 15 for their extra attack, even though these are underpowered compared to my new powers which give you 5 numbers to get an extra attack. So, I souped them up a little and added a couple more.

Yes, Weaponmaster is a little tribute to the old Rules Compendium stuff. I had to think hard on impaling to not create super-ridiculous archers with +d6 damage when ambushing, potential +d6 from Deadshot,and double damage (Runequest style) on top of that. I think the die minimum answer is a nice compromise.

Oh yeah, elves and dwarves now get one feat at level 5.

52 Pages Awesomeness Triage: Rogue (vs. Fighter)

Here's the current version of the rogue class in 52 Pages.

A rogue can shoot OK and fight using Dexterity. Speed save is the specialty, also boosted by high DEX. In skills, which depend on a d6 roll, the rogue starts with +1 in all except Knowledge, gains two instead of one skill points per level, and with a likely high Dexterity will get a further +1 on stealth and acrobatics.

As for the rogue's powers, what sort of combat role are they supposed to encourage? I suppose I would answer that the rogue is supposed to attack from back or side, rather than head on ... to use attacks from distance or from ambush as protection, rather than layers of metal armor ... to excel against a single opponent, rather than hewing through a horde like the fighter ... to be spontaneous and unpredictable instead of solid and reliable.

Looking back at how the rogue has played out (chiefly at the hands of my wife, who runs one in the main campaign), one of the abilities flatly fails at the above goals ... one is rarely used ... and the third works, but tends to lead to rules wrangling, so needs clarification.

Distraction is the one that's rarely used. It's a neat idea but has just too many uses, and is unreliable.

Active Defense is the one that effectively gives the rogue plate mail at mid-levels. Very little is stopping such a character from becoming a front-line bruiser. The rogue should be afraid to get hit, not confident in fancy footwork toe-to-toe.

Ambush is strong, and in character for almost all the desired points - it rewards striking from hiding as well as circling around behind, is no good against an army, and adds an extra unpredictable die of random damage. The only problem is, I haven't been enforcing "from behind" consistently, instead leaving the impression that it works only if the opponent is totally oblivious of the rogue's existence. Another bit of uneasiness came from one incident where the rogue played whack-a-mole, ducking down and scooting around behind a single piece of cover in order to get the bonus repeatedly.

I guess my sense is that these features make the class too strong, in concert with the really high AC bonus. So let's look at the proposed improvement.

Now, you get two powers at each level to the fighter's one to compensate for a lower hit die, lighter weaponry, and slightly worse attack. One is a mobility power and the other a combat power. Steal Away's hit and run is crucial for early-level survival, while Ambush is the basic incentive to sneak and Steal Past. You can't really whack-a-mole any more - but you do get the honest backstab bonus as a reward for maneuvering.

The Opportunity Strike and Exploitation Attack are just versions of the new fighter's bonuses. They key off high numbers rather than low in keeping with the rogue's erratic nature, versus the fighter's reliable nature. They are slightly less useful in that they possibly can lead to overkill or a useless attack.

52 Pages Awesomeness Triage: Fighter

It's been 17 months of playing with various forms of my 52 Pages rules, including a continuous campaign and over a dozen pick-up sessions, working with character levels from 1 to 5.

In this infrequent series of posts I'm going to share my thoughts about what works and what doesn't in various aspects of the game. I'll also try and fit the classes into a crude kind of balance structure that can perhaps be exploited later on to create modular prestige and NPC classes, trying to resolve the prestige class conundrum I posed earlier in the week. We'll start out with Mr. Meat and Potatoes, the fighter.

As it should be - he has top-notch hit points (+2 on each die), starting attack, and is unrestricted in the armor he can wear and weapons he can use. Wizards gain special powers as they advance, and a little bit of extra fighting capacity; fighters gain fighting capacity as they advance, with a little bit of special powers. The saves are fairly weak, with an advantage over the zero-level +3/+5/+7 only in Body.

What about the powers I've been giving to fighters?

In actual play, the Follow Through rule has been a huge hit. Fighter players love getting another attack (really, the Arneson "chop 'n' drop" version of the AD&D rule that gave multiple attacks against low-level critters). It makes the players cheer. And all this despite the fact that if you hit half the time, and kill half the time, and hit again half the time for an average of 5 damage, the feat is only worth 5/8 extra damage per round.

Not so much the "force/finesse" thing. It's easy to forget, and sometimes the results are underwhelming. The scaling to die size is awkward. It's not really missed.

The fate of my feats, gained at odd levels, is also uneven. The players only seem to choose, appreciate, or even remember the feats that give them extra attacks. The feats occupy two whole pages, and it's hard to decide what a standard high-level NPC fighter should have on that basis. From which we can derive this awesomeness rule:

Getting Extra Stuff (not bonuses) is Awesome. Extra dice, extra attacks.

So for 52 Pages Basic 2.0 I'm removing feats, and giving fighters standard, more awesome-feeling bonuses at odd levels. It will be possible to customize classes by swapping out powers, which is part of the reason I want these kind of effects to be comparable in power.

At level 3, you get something that's in line with a Fighter: dependability, reliability, guaranteed damage based on extra dice. This is balanced more or less with follow-through: it gives about a half of a point extra damage per round.

At level 5, you get what turns out to be one extra attack every 5 rounds. In keeping with the reliable nature of the Fighter, this second chance attaches to low rolls rather than high.

It's the easiest thing, now, to switch out these bonuses and have them trigger off high rolls rather than low, for a swashbuckler rather than ol' dependable flavor. But at least there's now a basic-feeling standard to riff from, for this basic version of my game.

OSR Contradiction 1: Play vs. Fiction

Attempts to enforce purity in the Old School Ratatouille are doomed to fail. Why?  Because in its glorious diversity it's fallen into at least two contradictions that I've become aware of writing recent posts. These contradictions are not fatal, except perhaps to an exaggerated sense of traditional gaming orthodoxy, but they bear mentioning.

Contradiction 1 relates to something I noticed a while back: Old-style D&D combat (any kind of D&D combat for that matter) bears little resemblance to the give and take of pulp fantasy combat. OK, so it's not the most original observation that D&D combat is not realistic. But it's remarkable that even the general style of play of high-level D&D heroes is at odds with the cautious, life-or-death approach taken by even the greatest heroes of early 20th century fantasy literature.

But also, as Aaron Steele recently remarked, "One of the unique features of Dungeons and Dragons is the idea of the ADVENTURING PARTY." The vaunted pulp fantasy influences can't really account for this confluence of archetypes that quickly settled in a foursquare formation. Fafhrd and the Mouser, the Eternal Champion and his sidekicks are duos cut from essentially the same cloth. The Fellowship of the Ring may have contributed the "fantasy races," elf-dwarf ribbing and all, but their mission is completely different and they're missing a few key players.

I've personally rejected the neo-Old School arguments to drop thieves ("Hey, everyone's a thief") or cleric-types ("Hey, no room for goody-goodies in Hyboria"). Only recently have I realized why.

In the first place, even taking both measures at once will bring you no closer to your Weird Tales utopia; you'll look in vain for all those pulp adventure stories featuring the sword-wielding barbarian and his wizard buddy. Drop the wizard PCs, and you'll have a true pulp adventure game (resembling perhaps Searchers of the Unknown). But it won't be D&D, or even T&T.

In the second place, the four classes are classics because they set up instant character conflicts within the party, but on a tame enough level that the party can still work together. To illustrate:

Silhouettes by Telecanter & myself

The fighter-wizard axis is the classic Kirk-Spock, Aubrey-Maturin, Narcissus-Goldmund alliance of opposites. Not all fighters and magic-users fit the stereotypes, of course. But the classes as developed in fantasy gaming tend to bear out the roles by making the wizard the combat-weak master of powerful but limited resources, and the fighter the more durable frontline figure.

The cleric-thief axis sets up moral debates and conflicts, encouraged by the altruistic nature of the cleric's gifts, and the acquisitive, loner nature of the thief's methods. I've had to express these in two ways because different play groups work differently with them. Some see the conflict as between the thief and the party (the labels in parentheses), others as seeing it as between the party and the rest of the world.

The moral axis may not work sometimes. It lets clerics and paladins be asshats by insisting on moral action detrimental to the party, and thieves and assassins be asshats by insisting on selfish action detrimental to the party. Things work out best, perhaps, when the thief advocates for the selfish and immediate interests of the party (as opposed to robbing sleeping companions) while the cleric advocates for the long-term moral interests of the party (as opposed to telling the truth to the Dark Lord's guards).

Perhaps these problems with the moral axis, or its suggestion that there is more than the looter ethos, leads some to reject its classes completely. I can't ... because that's not D&D. Despite all those problems, and implementation problems that persisted for twenty years, thieves and clerics nevertheless stuck around. I just don't see it as a positive to insist that the long-lived and very resilient party structure of the game is some sort of tumor that has to be excised to reach purity.

Contradiction 2 is coming up, and it leads in to my review and play guide for Tomb of the Iron God.

High-Level Combat: Designing Feats

In the Wizards editions of D&D, much is made of the tactical depth that the plethora of feats and skills gives to combat. This is part of a conscious decision to make fighter-types as interesting to play as classes that must make tactical and strategic choices among spells and skills.

I say "Bah to that!" and "Yay to dumb fighters!" Well, not exactly dumb; even when doing little more than tracking positioning in a fight, knowing how to use that can mean the difference between life and death. But in my view of the class archetypes, fighters are intentionally the straightforward ones. They don't have to make as many hard choices that are tied in with their class powers, and that is a good thing that serves the diverse needs of players.

Of course, this doesn't mean that playing a fighter has to be boring. In my house rules, awesome and interesting things happen to fighters without any choice. I use Arneson's "chop till you drop" rule to grant extra attacks when an enemy falls, as well as compensating low damage rolls  by having them inflict a critical effect on the enemy with some weapons (feats of force) and a fumble on the enemy with others (feats of finesse; I now reward low damage for both types of weapons, unlike the linked rule). Over some 8 sessions of play, these rules have proved to be fun and empowering without slowing down play.

It's the rogue - not just thieves in my view, but all kinds of light fighter - that I envision as using optional feats more effectively. But even for this goal, math-crunching can really take away from immersion in the game. An all-out attack where you get +2 to hit and -2 to armor class, for instance, can be wildly more effective depending on the relative to-hit ability and armor class of yourself and your opponent. Against someone you're hitting only on a 19, that doubles your effective damage. But if you're hitting on an 11 and your opponent hits only on a 19, that gives you only 20% increase in potential damage while doubling your opponent's. I want you to use your Piercing Stab not because you have calculated it increases your Actuarial Expected Damage Coefficient (AEDC) by 24%, but because you observe that the plates of the dragon are thick and scaly.


Which feats to take should mainly be a strategic, character-level rather than tactical choice. It should be back-loaded onto higher levels, so it doesn't encumber character creation. Also, the mathy figgering-out should be done by the rules designer rather than the player, trying to keep things as balanced as possible. For instance, do you want each feat on average to give the equivalent of +2 to hit (MATH CORRECTED)? This means, assuming a 50% chance to hit the typical opponent, the feat improves the chance by 20% (50% / 50%); 20% of the average damage per round, 2.5, is a half point of damage per round. It also means that an extra chance to hit (including gaining initiative or opponents being incapacitated from a critical hit effect) is worth 2.5 damage, so to be balanced it should happen about 1/5 (20%) of the time. This is roughly in line with the 1/6 to 1/4 chance of a crit/fumble my "feats of force and finesse" rule gives.

Defensive bonuses are harder to balance out, depending as they do on the relative hit probabilities and hit point totals involved. Anyway, I'm ruling these out as feats because a straight AC bonus prolongs fights, and this is anathema to our goal of making them more fun. Any defense will come as a side-effect of feats such as being able to disengage from combat without penalty, or maneuver into a position where fewer foes can hit. I'm also not ruling out hit point recovery mechanisms mirroring the bonus damage amount (about 1 hp every other combat round), making the most of the concept of hit points as player confidence and morale.

Next: OK, OK, some actual feats.

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 ...

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.