Alternative Combat System for D&D

If you're playing B/X or something similar, but perhaps you're a bit of a "roll player" (like me!), here's a quick little bolt-on system to bring some extra action into your combats. It is built on the basic principles of the DCC Mighty Deeds™ combat stunt system.

Step 1: Bump the thief up to a d6 hit die. Let's face it, he could use the boost.

Step 2: Use this for attack rolls:

1d16 + HD, i.e.

Fighter/Dwarf: 1d16+1d8
Cleric/Thief/Elf/Hobbit: 1d16+1d6
Magic-User: 1d16+1d4

For stunts, you have to declare them before rolling, get a 4+ on the hit die and a high enough total roll to score a hit. If you do not meet both conditions it's a miss. If you do meet both conditions, you can choose between scoring double damage (called shot), or scoring normal damage plus applying an effect, such as disarming, knocking down, pushing back, etc.

There's no advancement built in, so if you want the PCs to improve, you'll have to figure that out yourself. I figure a magic sword or whatever would allow you to replace the d16 with a d20 (more or less equivalent to a +2). I figure this is enough of an improvement over the regular system that we can just ditch the improvement over time. If you want to see the mathematical effect, check this graph.

For crits, you can do whatever, but I'd probably just do natural 16's for the sake of simplicity and giving a very minor bump to crit chances. Maybe even have fighters crit on 15-16 so they can be real murder machines.

If for some weird reason you don't already have several sets of zocchi dice, d16s can be bought individually.

Tinkering with Classes

The other day, Jeff Rients made a post about this old Dragon magazine article that allows you to build custom classes based on the component pieces.

I have been reading that article and goofing around with the basic principles since I read it. I've done some slight reworking of it to fit my game better, probably taking away more than adding, and I think it has just what I need to break out race and class as two separate things for my B/X-ish Outland game.

I took the 400 base XP and split it among the four things everyone must pick - hit dice, fighting capability, weapon damage, and saving throws. For everything else, I just performed the math on the values so that all you have to do is pick what you want and add all the numbers up.

Here is a draft of my version, which includes a very drafty version of some alternatives to the cleric's turn undead. These alternatives (Channel Energy and Cure) are stolen from 3E and DCC, respectively.

Here are some rough samples I created using these as well.

Once I'm comfortable with the basics, it should be easy to add new things that players come up with.

The best part, is this will allow me to split out race and class. Then I can have races with very simple bonuses, and if there's a race with something a little bit too special, we can just tack an XP value onto it. I like that the Labyrinth Lord AEC attempted to do this, but I think their approach is overly complex. Here is just a snippet from that version:

Dwarves receive the following saving throw bonuses:
• +2 save versus breath attacks
• +4 save versus poison
• +4 save versus petrify or paralyze
• +3 save versus wands
• +4 save versus spells or spell-like devices

I just don't like that.

I'd do something more like this:
Humans - +1 to any ability score.
Dwarves - Infravision, +2 to saves against magic (no more special dwarf saving throw table, they just use the class one), and they know stuff about stone.
Elves - Immune to ghoul paralysis. Sometimes when they pass a secret door, it becomes limned in a weird green light. No one knows why.
Hobbits - +1 to all saves. 1 bonus luck point. Can throw or fire a stone as far as a short bow.
Tieflings - Darkness or Cause Light Wounds 1/day.
Orcs - Intimidate: make a medium strength check (2 of 3 d20s equal to or under STR score). Success causes the enemy to make an immediate morale check at -1. Usable 2/day.
Goblins - Infravision. Pick pockets.

Something like that. Then level limits could be removed as well. Just thinking out loud. Anyways, if you see any holes in my basic approach here, please let me know.

Labyrinth Lord AEC Spell Reference Booklets

I put together some spell reference booklets for the cleric and magic-user. The source material is the Labyrinth Lord Advanced Edition Companion, but I pulled out the IP and also fixed the spell entries that say things like "this is the same as the cleric spell, so go look up that one even though you are a magic-user".

The PDFs are interior pages only, so you will have to make your own covers for these booklets using your favorite copyrighted art. I would have included the one I made for myself, but the art I used is from a currently in-print book that is less than 30 years old, so I figured I'd try not to piss those people off.

Enjoy!

Labyrinth Lord AEC Magic-User Spell Reference
Labyrinth Lord AEC Cleric Spell Reference

P.S. - If I ever get a player that plays a druid or illusionist, I might do those as well, but I don't see that happening in the near future.

Outland House Rules Booklet (Draft)

I finally got my Outland house rules booklet about 99% done. I just need to put in the credits to all the people I got art and ideas from, and figure out how to get that damn Quentin Caps font embedded on the first page. If it's something you think you might be interested in, feel free to take a peek and let me know what you think.

click for link to download

This was inspired by the work of Jason Vey, Jimm Johnson, and includes many of my favorite house rules by OSR dudes around the globe. It represents the vision of my personal "perfect D&D" (although that's certainly a moving target, and there's always room for more!)

Enjoy!

P.S. - I will update it as soon as I get the final kinks out as well.

Outland Sorcery

"The Hand" by Miguel Santos (pictishscout on deviantart)

Here is my first draft of B/X-ish sorcery, which is being introduced not as a new class, but as an alternate magic system that standard magic-users can opt into.

Outland Sorcery
At any time, a magic-user may choose to abandon the traditional study of magic and pursue the dark sorceries that are so prevalent in Outland. This decision is permanent, and gives the sorcerer the following benefits and limitations.
Spells no longer need to be memorized. A sorcerer can cast any spell he knows at any time, but he must make a spell check to do so (roll 2d6). The effects will depend on the result of the check. Thus, the sorcerer is sacrificing the reliability of the traditional magic-user for the flexibility of sorcery.

• Spell Fumble:
On a result of 2, the casting results in a critical failure. The sorcerer takes 1d6 subdual damage from the backlash per level of the spell. Additionally, there is a 10% chance of corruption per level of the spell. Roll a d10, and if the result is equal to or less than the level of the spell, a corruption occurs. The referee will let you know the nature of the corruption. Corruptions are generally permanent, but it is rumored that some sorcerers have successfully sought out ways to remove corruptions which they found to be particularly bothersome. If such a method exists, it certainly won’t be cheap.

• Failure:
If the result on the table indicates an F, the spell is lost and cannot be cast again until the following day after the sorcerer has rested.

• Delayed:
D indicates that the result of the spell is delayed, and will not take effect until the following round. If the caster is hit by a missile or engaged in melee before the spell goes off, the spell is treated as a failure.

• Immediate:
An I indicates that the spell goes off immediately.

• Spell Critical:
A result of 12 is a critical success, and the spell will have an increased effect, as determined by the referee.

To give credit where credit is due, this is influenced by Chainmail, the excellent work of Jason Vey in his Age of Conan and Forbidden Lore OD&D supplements, and the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG.

I would also like to have rules for sacrificing money/animals/people to get bonuses to spell checks (I really like Jason's rules for this, as outlined in his Secrets of Acheron supplement IIRC). I think a Summon Monster ability would be a nice touch as well. Actually, there are a million things I'd like to add, but I'm trying to keep it small enough to fit on a single digest-sized page, so I have to decide what's really important. I suppose I could always add complexity in the game through tomes or magic items, which is a strategy I've become quite fond of lately.

Anyways, I'm curious to know if anyone has any thoughts on the matter - good, bad, or indifferent.

Two-Weapon Fighting for B/X

In yet another episode of stealing great ideas from DCC, I present my two-weapon fighting rules for B/X. It should be totally self-explanatory, but feel free to ask a question if you find yourself scratching your head.

Note that this assumes the use of Akrasia's Weapon Damage by Class rule, but it should be fine even if you aren't using that rule. Also, if you want to simplify it even further, you could always just drop the strength component and say that everyone using two weapons must either have Small/Small or Medium/Small weapons.

Basic Outland Magic Weapons

I like B/X D&D because of the simplicity. But that doesn't tell the whole story. The truth is that I like the simplicity because it allows me to add in my own style of complexity, which generally consists of good ideas stolen from other people.

Sometimes I can quickly get out of hand with this, so the strategy I'm going to try with my B/X game is to leave the core game alone as much as possible, and add the fun fiddly bits through items, special training manuals, etc. This way these things can be added in a piecemeal fashion, and it should be easier to adjust things than it would be if say I wanted to change something about how a class works and there's some dude that's already been playing that class for a while.

Let's face it, the old +1 sword is kinda lame, even if it's "+3 versus lycanthropes". Thanks to DCC and these funny dice I have, we can do a few things to add a bit of freshness to these more or less mundane magical items.

First, it should be noted that I am using Akrasia's class-based weapon damage rules. Keeping that in mind, we always have the option to "key" a magic weapon to a particular class, in order to keep the fighters happy.

In the beginning, magic weapons are going to fall into one of three basic categories: improved attack, improved damage, or special effects.

Improved Attack: This one is very simple. You get to attack using a d24 with this weapon rather than a d20 (averages out to a +2 to attack rolls). That's it. But this is very nice to have because let's face it, missing sucks balls.

Improved Damage: There are a few ways to do this. The simplest is just to increase the size of the damage die by one step. Thus, a d4 becomes d5, d6 becomes d7, d8 becomes d10, d10 becomes d12. If you want to make a "bane" style weapon, such as a human-slayer, you can just say it works like a normal weapon, but add an additional d3 damage against humans. A traditional flaming sword would be +d3 fire damage, etc.

Special Effects: The sky is the limit. Here are a few ideas, both magical and mundane, to get your brain churning:

• Staff with a small oil reservoir. A button on the staff will spray the oil out in classic Spy Hunter fashion to aid in escape.
• Thunder nunchucks. Whenever these suckers hit their target and the required attack roll is exceeded by 5 (or 3 or whatever you like), a loud BOOM goes off, and the victim is stunned for d6 rounds. Also triggers a wandering monster check.
• Pointy weapon that will point to the nearest treasure hoard once per day on command.
• Electric whip and/or net. You know you want one. Go hunt down some slavers because those guys usually have them. Also, D&D needs more nets.
• Vicious blade. Crits on a 19 or 20 (fighters only).
• Rusty knife. Save vs. poison or get space tetanus, or something like that.
• Space Sword. Retracts like a switch blade. Owner can will the thing to his hand from up to 50' away.
• Wavy Sorcery Knife. Good for sacrifices. Each time a helpless victim is coup de graced with this thing, it gets a charge. The charge allows the wielder to try to cast an extra spell beyond their normal capability. Roll 2d6: 1 = oh shit, corruption; 2-5 = standard failure. nothing happens; 6-7 = spell can be cast, but it takes a full round and could potentially be interrupted if the monster notices you casting and stabs you; 8-11 = nice work! you cast that spell like a badass magic guy!; 12 = spell goes off instantly and with double the normal effect, to be determined by the referee.
• Batarang. Metal boomerang shaped like a bat. If you hit a guy with it, it will turn into a bat for 2d6 rounds and fly around that guy's face, making doing things like casting or making ranged attacks very difficult. If the bat is killed, sorry, that's that.

B/X Stocking Chart

For some reason, the way the stocking chart is laid out in the Moldvay basic book makes my brain slam on the brakes. I can't explain why, but the second part (whether or not there is treasure) just doesn't match up with how my mind works, and I always find myself staring at it for a few seconds.

So I made this to use instead, which has the added benefit of letting me use one of my funny dice. I found myself always coming up with fewer empties than I like, so I added an additional chance of an empty. You could just as easily use two different color d6's if you think empties are fine as they are.

I could have spent some time prettying it up - inking, adding color, and so forth - but right now I'm more interested in the utility, as I have lots of rooms to populate.

Enjoy!

Adventures in Outland: Marathon Session

So I'm all set up to run a game at Lake Geneva Games on Saturday, August 27th from Noon to 10:00pm.

click for a nice big legible version

The adventure is set up for beginning characters using B/X rules. If you own a copy of Labyrinth Lord, you may use that if you'd like. The store should also have a few copies of Labyrinth Lord available, so if you are planning on buying it, support this excellent game space by buying it from the store!

This game tries not to take itself too seriously, and may or may not feature the following:
draculas, space aliens, lawful werebears, nunchucks, laser guns, dinosaurs, purple cows, dick and fart jokes, beautiful amazons, bar fights, ninjas, unlabeled potions, barsoomian harnesses, chocobos, and so forth.

This game is also FLAILSNAILS compatible, so if you'd like to bring in an existing PC under those edicts, just email me at least a few days ahead of time with your character info and we'll get it worked out.

Gearing Up for Memorial Day Weekend!

My family, my parents, and my sister and brother-in-law are all getting ready to head down to lovely Shelbyville, IL for some holiday camping. We have cabins, so it's kind of like luxury camping. In preparation, I have dug out X2 - Castle Amber, and printed up some player copies of Labyrinth Lord (first 60 pages).

I've had this module printed out for some time, but now that I'm actually reading it, I'm pretty excited about the whole thing. It's a really fantastic adventure, and is right in line with the sort of things I like (tons of W E I R D!)

I'm going to try to get my dad to play, too. That should make for some good times!

I'm going to do my best to just play straight by-the-book LL rules, since we've never really done that. I'm going to give characters 20,001 xp to start, which will be level 5 for everyone except elves (level 4) and thieves (level 6). The only thing I'm not real clear on is what sort of magic items to start people with, if any. Most modern games have guidelines as to how much magical treasures a player should have at a given level, yet old-school games have no such guidelines, and I suspect that this varies wildly from DM to DM.

So, I'm open to any suggestions. Also, if you have any experiences to share concerning this particular module, I'd love to hear them!

I hope everyone has a great Memorial Day weekend!