Critical hits and Critical Fails

Critical hits.  There are lots of different mechanics from different systems, but the ol' default always seems to be 20 always hits + critical effect, and a 1 always spectacularly fails.


Statistically this seems to be stacked against the players.  They are usually the few that fight the horde. So if every roll has a 5% chance of not only hitting no matter what but doing extra damage on top of it that horde of goblins is suddenly a bit scarier (not really, but mathematically they are fearsome!)  That 5% comes up a lot more too but no one really cares if a goblin drops his sword.  There are too many to deal with anyway.


Yet players love Critical hits.  As a player I love critical hits.  I think the first rule we tossed in 3rd edition D&D was the confirming a critical nonsense.  Don't deny me my criticals!


After all this is the stuff those great gaming stories are made from.  In one game the DM introduced us to the big bad (a vampire).  We weren't supposed to beat him, weren't really supposed to get into a fight at all, but we did.  The plan was we were to be defeated, learn a bit of his plan, level up for a while and then climatically defeat him at the end of the campaign.


What really happened though....


We descended into the cave and started to battle the big bad.  A few rounds in we realized what we were fighting.  We didn't have magical weapons, not a lot of magic, and realized we were outclassed, we didn't even realize how badly we were outclassed.  My wife who didn't have a lot of D&D experience at the time, said she was making a called shot with her crossbow at his heart, because stake through the heart works on vampires right?  I cast true strike on her because it seemed like the best option at the time and then she rolled and got a natural 20.  The DM decided it didn't matter if undead "couldn't get critical hits on them" The bolt few true, pierced his heart and killed him.  High fives went all around and the tale is still told to this day (outside this blog as well!) The GM let us kill the big bad early, because it was just too cool an opportunity and the dice were on our side along with a good plan, who was he to let a little rule get in the way of a good time and sharing in player success.  He just pencil whipped in that the real big bad was a deamon or some such, and we fought it later.

So on the other side of the screen now I keep critical hits around for just that very reason.  I've expanded a bit on the critical fails as well.

I ran a group through Keep on the Boarderlands.  It was the one time I was planning on having them encounter orcs and goblins and such so I put in a bit more thought than normal to the cannon fodder.

I did this by expanding the critical fails.  Whenever the goblins rolled a 2-5 I aborted their attack and had them do something rather goblinish.  They would loose interest in the battle and take a nap, stop and pick their nose, get confused and think that they were retreating only to realize that they were wrong and come back next round.  I saved the dreaded 1 roll for them getting some revenge on another goblin and taking the thick of melee to stab the other one in the back while no one was noticing.

I played it for laughs and the players seemed to really like it.  Looking back I think it added more personality to the monsters they fought rather than the normal swing and miss, swing and hit results from the dice.

I liked this so much I expanded this to other monsters, though I ended up reducing the numbers to 1-3.  So whenever this came up I use the opportunity to have the monster do something to show its personality (after all the players aren't going to sit down and have a tankard of ale and get to know them anyway).  They may boast, or gloat.  I'll have the monster give a "tell" in a round as a precursor to using a special ability, like a dragon taking a deep breath as the round action prior to using its breath weapon.

Magical mishaps

I like the idea of magic being a glass cannon in games. Really powerful, but fickle.

The trick is making it incentivized for players enough to be worthwhile, while also actually posing some risk.  Of course the trade off is that this would apply to villains as well.  While probably anti-climactic to have Vecna melt his own skull off, it just might help out mid fight.

A big chunk of the inspiration for this was the book of the dead from Evil Dead.  Where just reading the book (or playing the audio recording of it being read…) was enough to invoke the ancient evil, even if the actual speaker had no idea what they were doing.

-Anyone can cast a spell of any level they have encountered.  Most are written in some esoteric tongue (i.e. latin, etc. ) but other than that they are accessible.  No one wants to actually use a book that was written in code that they’ll have to decipher every time they want to use it. Magic has its drawbacks though.  Every time you cast a spell there is a chance of something bad* happening.  The very act of learning magic also corrupts the mind and soul distancing you from the people around you.  Every spellbook you read will pervert your sense of reality in some way (this is the true reason why wizards are running around wearing pointy hats with stars on them or live as unwashed hermits and so forth) [mechanic effect: for every 6 spells learned, a quirk is developed.  It may be assigned from a spellbook (GM) or if you pick up 6 spells a la carte from scrolls, self study or what have you, you get to make one up!]

So why be a magic user then?

Magic users don’t suffer the chance of something bad happening when they cast spells within their class/level restrictions.

Magic users can also create spells through independent research.  Non-magic users can only cast spells they come across in books, scrolls, or are taught by other means.   

*So what do I mean by bad stuff.

For any spell cast above the normal class level ability for spell per day / level make a saving throw vs. Magic. Upon failure roll on the following table.

If you fail the saving throw here is the spell fail effect. (roll 1d20)

1  Overcome by otherworldly visions collapse for 20+d20 hour coma.  When you wake up you understand more of the deeper functions of the universe.  Ask the DM one Yes / No question.  

2 1d10 wiz damage 1d10 int damage.  Heals at the rate of 1 point an hour

3 cast random other spell of the same level 1-3 cleric spell 4-6 magic-user spell

4 spell failure, no other effect

5 Reverse the spells effect (heal causes damage etc)

6 Mana burn: take 10% max HP (round up) as damage.  Spell fails.  If this kills the caster they burn up from the inside leaving nothing but ash behind.

7 Spell fails.  It was another magic user that made you fail, you are sure of it.  Probably that friend of yours.  They’re jealous of you and your power, best keep you eye on them-the probably want to steal all your stuff for themselves.   

8 Cast Summon (See LotFP Rules and Magic, its free - google it)

9 spell goes horribly wrong (like the transporter incident from Star Trek 1, let your imagination go wild)

10 Illusionary spell: Caster thinks it cast successfully, no-one else sees anything

11 Change target randomly (spell caster included)

12 Area of effect targets single target (closest to center) single target spell affects 1d6 1-2 sphere 3-4 cone  5-6 line (centered on original target)

13 magic drain, suffer -1 int or wiz for # turns = spell level, spell cast as normal

14 stunned -1 to all rolls for # of rounds = spell level, spell cast as normal

15 spell cast with minimum effect, all dice are 1s

16 spell cast with altered cosmetic effect, mechanical effects are the same.  Lighting damage is instead giant balls of hail, or thorny vines that whip out and attack victim.  Sleep is extreme apathy that makes someone completely unresponsive, prismatic spray shoots bubbles, or butterflys, etc.  

17 spell cast as normal

18 spell cast as normal

19 spell cast as normal

20 Spell cast successfully with overpowering effect (max range, have damage dice explode, etc. etc. sleep causes coma, charm creates obsessive sycophant, etc. )

For: OSR/DND 1-2nd ed

Saving throws favor wizards and give ¼ chance of success at 1st level and get to roughly ¾ chance of success at 20th level.  I like this margin because it isn’t horrible at 1st level, but there is still risk even at 20th level.  Other classes don’t have quite such good odds, but that’s ok, they aren’t magic users, so I don’t mind there being more risk for them.

For 3rd ed/Pathfinder  I think a DC 20 save.  It makes the base difficulty a bit higher, but with attribute bonuses and feats I can see it also being possibly abused.

The 15-20 results are so when a spell is cast- given a ¼ chance of success on the save.  There is a ~7/16 chance of the spell being cast successfully and a 9/16 chance of something going wrong.  Risky but not unreasonable odds I think.

I was tempted to include hp damage to the list, but realized this just unfairly punished magic users compared to fighters etc.  

A future project, may be to revise the list to include spell specific side effects. But that is a project for another day.

Learning Chinese and sanity loss

Many moons ago I had the wonderful opportunity to take a crash course in Cantonese. Three months of full days of language training taking me from not knowing a single word, to... well... running out of time to learn more Chinese before I went to Hong Kong.  You see in those three months, my classmates and I did learn some Chinese.  Towards the end of the class I realized that we were in fact speaking a strange secret language unknown to the rest of the world.  No one else around us in the language training center could understand us (they weren't learning Cantonese!) but I was pretty sure that no one in Hong Kong would understand us either.  Our small group had become separated from everyone else because of the knowledge we held.


So what does this have to do with gaming?


In Call of Cthulhu and many other weird/horror games there is some sort of sanity mechanic.  How well can you hold it together when you have encountered the fantastic cosmic horror that doesn't care about you or your cat, Mittens.


Most of the time this loss of sanity is articulated with some mechanic to make the character "go crazy" and true to the writings of Lovecraft it should.  His protagonists are often on the verge of committing suicide, being unable to continue on with their newfound knowledge, with others committed to asylums for their discoveries.


Sanity loss needn't be relegated to developing restrictive dementias added to a character sheet.  Sanity loss can instead be a measure of how well the character can fit into society.  The act of simply knowing (the truth) can be enough to have them locked away in a nut house.   


After witnessing cultists, with the assistance of their otherworldly assistants, attempting to summon some eldritch evil, the investigators go to the local police to get help.


If the tell everything they have seen, at best they may be considered a nuisance, at worst they may be locked away as a danger to themselves and others because the claims in and of themselves are outlandish and ridiculous. 


A character who has read forbidden tomes and gained magical abilities would be mocked at best or condemned by a church at worst. 


So encountering weird and horrific things can be their own curse, but sanity mechanics can still come into play.


Sanity loss can measure how well the character can keep their mouth shut.  It is human nature to want to talk.  (Most of Lovecraft's writings are couched as some sort of confessional) The more sanity loss a character suffers, the more they feel a need to talk about what they have seen.  The therapy rules fit in nicely with this as the character is venting their experience and thus regain sanity points


Sanity loss as a partial breakdown.  You don't have to throw out the weird quirks and dementias completely.  You can provide legitimate information regarding the horrors the character has encountered.  If the character is told that the things can travel through shadows, the character will naturally be apprehensive around them, and may take actions to eliminate them whenever possible.  There is a rational reason for the character to perform the act, but to everyone else the actions are the fruit of an unstable mind.  Of course you can just as easily provide inaccurate information and let the character react to false information.


Sanity loss as a complete breakdown.  Of course the persons mind can just snap not being able to handle what they have seen.  Heart attacks from fear, or loss of hope, or ability to function  these can all occur as well. But much like character death, as a GM, I find these far more interesting to use as a threat rather than an actual event.


Sanity loss as a measurement of separation from the group is the same as learning Chinese slowly  separated my group from those around us until we reverted to the norm of speaking English.


Oh, and one of the high points for me was when I realized that the word "mogwai" from the movie Gremlins was the Cantonese word for demon and not just a made up name for the type of critter gizmo was. 

The four horsemen of the apocalypse

Plague, Famine, War, and Death


There are lots of mechanics in systems for dealing with these.  Saves vs. diseases, rules for starvation, mass combat rules, and of course how to deal with escrow when your character buys the farm.  These are all great, but can also be somewhat tedious as I’ve always liked these to be motivators for characters in stories rather than something players directly interface with because it seems kind of anti-climactic to have a character die of dysentery, the pox, a random bit of shrapnel.  So I humbly submit some ways to incorporate these horrors into a setting without squashing the players, or reducing these tragedy's to some dice rolls.


Plague.  Disease comes in a wide variety of vectors, fatality rates, and horrible symptoms.  My rule of thumb is give a 1 in 10 chance each time a player returns to an area/building where there is an NPC they would normally interact with (inn-keeper, shop-keeper, or named NPC), the NPC is unavailable due to the plague (sick, dead, or dealing with family in those states).  Mind you the black plague is given the variable of killing 30-60% of Europe.  Have the occasional NPC cough or express a minor symptom (feel free to fake some rolls here if you want to keep the players on edge).  Express the smell of sickness is in the air. 


Encounters:
     Quarantine:  An NPC expresses the plague symptoms in the building the characters are in and the building is quarantined until everyone with the symptoms dies. 
     Random encounters all have their initial reaction reduced one level due to fear that the PCs might be carrying the plague. 
     A character receives a message that a far off family member has contracted the plague


Symptom examples:
Light: Headache, light sensitivity, cough, congestion, light headedness, gas, indigestion
Moderate: Nausea, Constipation,  boils, oozing sores, breathing issues, fainting
Severe: Vomiting, Dysentery, bleeding sores, cough up blood, coma,


Famine.  The law of supply and demand.  Food is available, otherwise everyone would just die in a week.  The problem is there are too many people for the food available.  Food should be expensive.  Double or triple the price.  Paint the scene by expressing the lack of what is normally in the background.  Animals are scarce, dogs aren’t heard barking and cats aren’t meowing when characters approach.  When they see other people eat you can describe how portions are merger, or lacing in variety (only potatoes, or mushrooms).   When the players eat though, describe about how good the food tastes, and that they lick their plates and fingers clean savoring every morsel.  The meals may be bland but when the character is only eating once a day, they don’t have the luxury of complaining about meals without spices or only contain stringy meat.  Have people be less lively.  They aren’t eating and are tired so service is slow, people as to be excused for staying sitting.  Up the encumbrance penalty by a level for the players in their weakened state.  Save the starvation rules for when players are stuck away from civilization and rations have run out.  If the players have animals, have the townspeople stare at them hungrily. 


Encounters: 
     Players witness a public execution for food theft or hoarding
     The constant crying of an infant because a woman who cannot feed her baby.  She isn’t eating enough to produce milk.
     A family stops feeding or exiles an elderly member because they would die soon anyway
Meat is temporarily available, but no one will talk about where it came from 


War.  Until modern times more people died from the first two during wartime than actual battle, and for good reason.  If disease caught hold of an army, you had a large group of people, with poor sanitation so it would spread rapidly.  These mobile armies needed a large amount of supplies to maintain and logistics were at best dodgy, so they were often supplemented by scavenging the surrounding area (a good reason to be fighting in someone else’s territory) so non-combatants would feel the effects of war, through rationing, pillaging by hostile and friendly forces, the drafting of fighting age men, and the disease that could be brought along with them.  All of this added to the disaster that would come if your town if it had any strategic importance and became a battleground itself.  Like famine increase prices, only affect all items on a random basis due to the fortunes of war. 1d4 1) +25% 2) +50% 3) +100% 4) +200%


Encounters:
     A recruiter is drumming up new enlistees (or draftees) for the war effort, the players look like healthy, strapping folks who are loyal to their king…
     A small group of Soldiers have been left behind in the town due to their wounds and left in care of the townsfolk
     While traveling through a recent battleground with carrion bird flying overhead, or feasting on the remains of the dead, discarded equipment by the fleeing forces.  A lady from the nearby town is stepping through the corpses and then kneels weeping over the body of her husband
 
Death.  All of the above can lead to a lot of dead bodies very quickly for a variety of reasons.  These can then in turn spur a vicious cycle of the others.  Enough dead farmers can lead to insufficient hand to bring in the crops that rot in the field and which leads to famine.  Improperly cared for bodies can lead to contamination that spreads disease.  Enough dead from any cause may lead to blaming leaders and a revolt and bloody battle to gain the necessary resources or change the status quo.   People will develop coping methods to deal with the death all around them.  Children play morbid games, and people develop a gallows humor.  In a metropolis high fashion grieving clothing is all the rage. 




Encounters:
     The town is rotting.  There aren’t enough living left to care for the dead.  A miasma of putrescence has settles on the town that spoils food and curdles milk pre-maturely.
     The treasure form an encounter is made up of precious metal fillings from teeth and wedding bands stolen from a mass grave
     A doom prophet warns that the end time has come
     A man is collecting the dead into a cart (this could be someone collecting specimens for medical research, or a necromancer, or something else).
     A snake oil salesman is selling a trinket that will ward off/ cure the cause of the death.


These events can be the fallout form the actions of a major villain, but also can be incorporated into the backdrop of an adventure.  The plague, famine or war is not a problem for the characters to solve.  It is not a "big bad" to defeat.  These events can be useful to reduce an excess of player resources, but hopefully these will serve to help the players feel that they are part of a bigger world with events going on that they are not directly involved in.

Green Faced Devil

Traps.  Monsters and Treasure.  These are the three things that are the signature occupants of fantasy dungeons.  Today I want to focus on traps. 

Long ago I heard the story of a brilliant party destroying trap.  It was the a wall decoration of a carved devil face with its mouth open, the inside was pure blackness.  The blackness was caused by a small sphere of annihilation being set inside the mouth, so anything that went into the hole just ceased to be- no saving throw, no damage, just gone.  There was no reason a party needed to interact with the object.  It didn’t block their way- but curiosity being what it was the story went that someone stuck their 10 foot pole into the hole.  10 foot pole was gone. The rogue stuck his head in to see what happened to the pole and lost his head.  They then tried to attack “the thing that attacked the now headless party member” i.e. hole and lost a weapon.  I would have thought that this would have made them learn the lesson, but the party proceeded to reach in after the weapon and loose limbs etc. This continued until the party was completely maimed or killed. Years later I would find out that this story was from a trap in the Tomb of Horrors module, so I ran out and bought it almost immediately. 

Traps fall into two varieties.  Those that are there are those that are hidden like the hidden pit trap in the floor or poison dart in a treasure chest.  And those that are obvious like the green faced devil from the Tomb of Horrors and can be readily observed by the players who can choose to avoid the object or investigate at their own peril.

While both have their place how I approach them when it comes to game mechanics is different.  One of the primary roles of a rogue in the party is to detect and disarm traps.  I use these for the more common, hidden trap.  So to speed up game play and make life (a little) easier for the rogues.  As long as the party is moving at adventuring speed, taking their time to observe their surroundings, I give them an automatic roll for checking for traps when they enter a room.  I leave it up to the player if they want to make this roll every time or if I should just make it for them as I give out room descriptions etc.  This way the rogue’s player doesn’t have to tediously ask with every door and room if there are traps.  I’ll afford the rogue a 2^nd check for traps roll if they are specifically inspecting the item in question, again I don’t make them ask for checking traps, we just assume they are as long as they aren’t madly grabbing things and stuffing them into bags. I just tell them to roll and let me know if they beat the minimum threshold we establish.  This way they can take care of all the dice rolling while the other party members are giving their actions and it keeps things moving smoothly. 

The second type of trap is there to be solved as a puzzle or only activates by direct interaction.  These are not nearly as common and I don’t tell them that these exist even if they succeed in their roll.  The trade off is that it is always part of the room description. So they know it is there- just not what it does.  Think of the dart shooting walls from Indiana Jones.  It was obvious something was up in the room between the holes in the walls and the pressure plated floor.  So that would be a description of the room for the entire party.  Solving the problem isn’t just a disarm traps roll, it is creative thinking to walk carefully across the floor, have the wizard levitate across, or take another path through the dungeon.

While these types of traps are my favorite they take a lot more work to set up.  One of the reasons I like them is that they can be figured out by the non-rogues in the party as well.