Monday, December 15, 2008

Cleric Requirements

In 3.5 D&D there are multiple negative conditions such as negative levels, poisons, ability score damage, diseases, curses, and so on. One of the major problems is that to deal with these you need a cleric. This forces most serious parties to have a cleric. Those without will soon run into issues.

One thing they did in 4.0 was to remove this 'needed' class role. They did so in two main ways. The first was simply removing the vast majority of these conditions. Negative effects tend to go away with a save and healing powers just have a generic bonus to saves. Also these negative effects don't stay around between encounters because they moved towards the model of each encounter being an event instead of a set of encounters designed to wear you down. The other way they handled this was Rituals. Vital out of combat spells are no longer limited to a Wizard or Cleric. You need your Fighter to be able to teleport the party? No problem. A couple of feats and he can. So all of the special healing tasks can essentially be performed by anybody.

I am briefly going to describe how these things work in World of Warcraft. In Warcraft there are basically 5 types of debuffs: Curses, Poisons, Diseases, Magic, and Untyped. Untyped debuffs can not be removed by players but the other types can all be removed by various healing classes and one non-healing class. Each class can remove from 2 to 3 of these types with a single non healing class able to remove 1. I like this approach because it makes each class able to do a lot in terms of debuffs, but it leaves things that they can not do. But WoW benefits from the same model of encounter battles as 4.0 D&D. Effects do not persist between encounters.

So if you were a player, how would you handle the lack of a cleric. You would have to purchase magic items such as Wands of Cure Light Wounds and Lesser Restoration along with a couple scrolls in order to make up for the lack of cleric. This forces you to have these items readily available for sale which you might not really want for campaign feel.

So how could you change 3.5 to reduce the need for a cleric. You could add spells to the paladin, druid, and even wizard spell lists. You could allow negative effects to be treated with the Healing skill, although this kind of reduces the dire feeling of negative effects if they can be simply removed by non-magical means. Or you could add Rituals. Spells that people could get that removed negative effects, but that could only be used outside of combat and possibly required expensive materials. This would help you get by without a cleric, but it would also move 3.5 D&D away from an attrition model. But in my mind that is a good thing.

Monday, November 17, 2008

Microsoft Ad

Being a DM is often a difficult job. One of the difficulties, but not the only one, is tracking a large amount of information. I think one of the best tools to handle this is a laptop. I think most people have access to a laptop and anyone who invests most likely hundreds of dollars into D&D books can probably drop a couple hundred on a low performance laptop.

So what should you have open on laptop. Well Wizards would probably want you to have some D&D insider tool open, but I don't see the big value in that for a tabletop game. A vritual tabletop really only helps if you have some kind of projector or if everyone has a laptop. What I usually have open is a browser and an editor to take notes or read notes from. But what I would probably want to use is a browser and Microsoft OneNote.

Microsoft OneNote is a note taking application made by Microsoft. It is designed to be a common note taking area that can be used by multiple people concurrently and at my job we occasionally use it to share information. But it is also just very well built for taking and organizing notes. One of my co-workers has done a survey of all kinds of note taking software and says that Microsoft OneNote is a level above the rest in terms of handling note organization. Alhough I have not done a similar survey, I do attest to the fact the OneNote is a very good application for organizing information. Unfortunately it costs money. Fortunately I get it free with my MSDN (MicroSoft Developers Network) account.

So OneNote for taking down information and storing information. I would also have a browser for several reasons. One is to access Javascript applications. I use one to track initiative and one to handle hidden group roles like Search, Spot, Listen, Sense Motive and so on. I usually have a pane open to the SRD and one open to the game wiki. I use a free wiki hosting site to hold information for my game and put up optional rules, experience, game info and so on there. Players also theretically keep there characters there as well. Although I have been lax on updating the wiki for anything but XP lately.

Durations, part 2

In my recent game my players are exploring a dungeon. They have a large number of magical effects that they use. These effects are either 1 round, 1 minute, 10 minutes, or 1 hour per level. Fourth edition, like I mentioned before just has 1 round, until you save, while concentrating, or entire encounter durations.

So here are questions answered by durations. My players put on several magical effects that lasted 10 minutes per level, such as Resist Fire and Freedom of Movement. For a 15th level caster this is 2.5 hours. So you could assume that the entire adventure lasts under 2.5 hours, but when numerous battles are fought and many large rooms are searched it questions this assumption. The same question applies to spells that last 15 minutes. Is it on in the encounter after it is cast? What about the encounter after that? Another timing question is how long does it take to scan every room we have been in with some detect spell. At this can get very granular, for example my players have a Wand of Detect Secret Doors. Each charge lasts a minute so many charges are used to scan an entire complex...

I said before that in combat durations are easy to track. They also become meaningless to track after a certain level. Most combats go anywhere from 3 to 10 rounds. Most round per level spells will simply be on for the entire combat and not on for the next.

So how do we handle those questions I mentioned earlier. Well, what I am doing is just making guesses and imposing those on the players. After 8 or 9 encounters I said that there 10 minute per level spells were gone. But could you track time? Tracking time tends to be something very easy to do in computer games, but a pain in the butt for pen and paper games. So if you tracked time how would you do it?

Each battle and the after combat activities of picking up weapons, letting effects wear off, some healing spells can be roughly estimated to be 2 minutes. In some cases letting effects wear off will take longer such as a 10 minute paralysis. Searching a 50'x50' room takes 10 minutes. Travelling super cautiously (searching while moving) means 50' per minute. Just walking means about 200' per minute assuming a 20' movement rate. Stealthy travelling would be half normal speed. So you could track rough estimates in time by marking minutes. But that is one more thing to track for a likely already overtaxed DM.

Another solution is to turn those durations into 'number of encounter' durations. For instance a round per level spell turns into a 1 encounter spell. A minute per level spells would last 2 encounters. Ten minute per level spells would last 10 encounters. Hour per levels spells would just last the entire day. This is an easy way to handle things, but it reeks of inaccuracy. It completely ignores time in between which could be spent carefully exploring a dungeon or even travelling since the encounters might be during a wilderness trek. So I really don't like handling things this way.

I think, in general, if you track time using rough values using some easy to use method it is probably the the way to go. It may have benefits beyond spell durations such as tracking time related to some plot event. For example, the kidnapped king will be executed at high noon, the players have 2 hours to recuse him.

So for tracking I think a little javascript application with buttons like "Fight", "Search Small (20'x20') room", "Search Large (50'x50') room", "Travel 100'", and so on with a counter at the top. You would have a control to enter a spell and it's duration. You could then have then duration display whether it was still active. Also maybe a hidable log of all the events.

Sunday, November 2, 2008

Crafting, some clarifications

This post is meant as a follow up to http://will-gamedesign.blogspot.com/2008/11/crafting-alternative-system.html and is basically in reponse to some comments.

First, you talk of gaining Materia in terms of points, but in using it you talk in terms of Gold Piece Equivalent (GPE). In addition to this inconsistency, you do not provide a conversion factor or guidelines for creating a campaign specific conversion factor. I think converting adds an unnecessary complication to this system and would advise sticking to one or the other, preferably GPE.

Yeah, I wasn't clear on this. The idea is that Materia would always be measured in terms of gold piece equivalents, but I used the term "Materia point" that was confusing. It was my thought that Materia would always be measured in terms of gold value, although it is possible that Materia might be very marked up in some cases. So you could spend 2 gp for 1 gp worth of Materia.

You may also want to limit which enemies provide Materia, or you will likely get a ghoulish campaign where the party spends every after-battle stringing their opponents up to harvest their body parts.

One thing I had though of in the past was that certain foes would provide more Materia such as Dragons or Demons while Humanoids would provide less. I thought that was a complication I wouldn't want to introduce until it was more playtested. I do see the potential for weirdness when the characters are collecting Materia from everything, but unless the players get gruesome, which would be a role-playing choice they made, it can be as simple as collecting a few drops of blood.

Indeed, your idea of Materia appearing in places might actually work better for this than harvesting body parts. Places with great elemental affinity (ex. a red dragon's den, a beach by a great ocean, the middle of an untamed wilderness, the site of a great tragedy, etc.) could develop small amounts of very valuable Materia over time. It would explain why, for instance, a tribe of Kobolds living on the edges of a great forest might have a small supply of wood-aligned Materia in their village, having found it or traded for it with those deeper into the woods.

This idea was actually stolen from Ars Magica. In Ars Magica it is assumed the wizards can easily turn lead into gold so they replace money treasure with magical essence treasure. But Materia can show up as naturally generated by a magical place or as just included in normal treasure. I wanted to include harvesting Materia from monsters because this gives players treasure from monsters that they might not normally be able to get treasures from. It also gives the Materia more flavor since the encounters tend to be vivid in characters minds. For example, your +2 sword is much more exciting when you know the blade was quenched in the blood of a giant you once slew.

On the topic of harvesting Materia, I think that if you are going to let it be used as an alternative to spell components, limiting who can harvest it is a bad idea. It forces people who have no intention of crafting to take crafting feats just to make sure they can get access to these materials. You can see some of this dynamic in our current game where nobody has identify on their spell lists and the amount of annoyance this has caused us at times. I would say make a slightly higher level difficulty search check.

I guess I am assuming that most parties will probably have an item crafter. One affect of this is making item crafting much better so it is very advantageous to have such a feat. Remeber that wizards start with Scribe Scroll, or in this case Craft Minor Magic Item. I imagine the process as a mystical one so I wouldn't want just anyone to be able to do it. I would say that Materia would not be easily sold so you wouldn't get that much value from it.

I see your point about Identify, that a party can be severely hampered by lack of certain abilities, but this ability can be obtained by any caster easily, unlike a spell like Identify that is only on certain spell lists. Also, the players made specific choices about their characters to abandon utility classes to order to have more focussed characters. So in part dealing with the consequences isn't necessarily horrible. But it does point to a shift from 3rd to 4th edition where any kind of required class or power is no longer actually required in 4th.

Also, I think that limiting 'reclaiming' Materia from an item to a GPE of 25% of the item's cost will not create as much value as you seem to think from your post. Let's say you have a 1000 GP item. Assuming general market availability of Materia, which makes more sense: getting 250 GP of Materia by reclaiming it and destroying the item, or selling the item for 500 GP and buying 500 GP of Materia?

Okay, here is the bad news. As part of this gaining all sorts of new Materia treasure, I would enforce more limits of what Materia could be bought and what magic items could be sold. So I would probably say the magic items could only be sold for 20% of their value. You could also limit the amount of Materia available for purchase. This would encouage players to disenchant items in order to not consume all the Materia that is for sale.

One thing this system allows is easier creation and if you allowed magic items to be sold at 50% their value that 50% would also be the cost to create the item. That would allow players to very easily turn one item into another of equal value. I think that when items are destroyed and remade something should be lost so that you can't easily reconfigure your items on a day by day basis.

Thanks for the input Wayne.

Saturday, November 1, 2008

Full Attacks

In 1st and 2nd edition fighter types, fighters, rangers, and paladins acquired extra attacks as they went up in level. At 7th level they gained an extra attack every other round. At higher levels (I don't remember which level) they gained a full 2nd attack every round. If I remember correctly these extra attacks happened after everyone had their normal attacks. Monsters, however, often had a large series of attacks they used all at once. In edition, fighters got one attack per level to use against creatures under 1 HD.

In third edition this evolved. Every character got multiple attacks but fighter types got them faster. At 20th level it was possible to have 4 attacks. The limitation was that if you moved you only got one of your attacks. Monsters still had a series of attacks, but they also had the limitation that they could attack once and move or attack with all their attacks. But gone was the notion of a round of second attacks after all the normal attacks. Also gone was the special attack per level for under 1 HD creatures. Instead they added Cleave and Great Cleave that allowed you to take extra attacks after dropping a target. So what you ended up with was a big distinction between a full attack and a standard attack especially since some effects gave you an extra attack during a full attack like haste. Certain monsters, also had numerous attacks. So the difference between a standard attack and a full attack gets so big that it defines strategies. For example, let's say you are a 9th level fighter battling a large white dragon. We are going to ignore the effects of reach for now in order to demonstrate a point. You have 2 attacks while the dragon has 6. Instead of fighting toe to toe, the better strategy is to attack and then run away. You suffer an attack of opportunity, but if the dragon wants to attack you again it must move to you in order to attack so it will only get a single attack. So instead of you getting 2 attacks for every 6 the dragon gets you get 1 attack for every 2 the dragon gets. So if you are fighting a foe that has a full attack much more potent than your own full attack it is better to attack him once, then run away taking an attack of opportunity. Various strategies become focussed around trying to deny your opponent a devastating full attack since the full attack is so powerful.

One option is to get rid of full attacks, but that poses a rather significant balance issue. Multiple attacks are one of the major tools for balancing melee types and casters. Some people tend to think that melee types are already to weak compared to casters, although that is a discussion for another post.

So what did 4th edition do. They essentially got rid of the full attack. You have a standard action that can be used as an attack. Dedicating your movement to attacking does not give you any advantage. But you are largely stuck with a single attack. This single attack can be turned into multiple attacks or attacks that do large amounts of damage by encounter and daily powers. Monsters often have a power they can use at will that allow them to use multiple attacks, but they tend to get much fewer attacks than they did in 3rd edition. For example, the king of multiple attacks, the dragon goes from around 6 attacks to 2 or 3. In general, the whole system of actions in 4th edition tends to be more solid and make more sense.

I would have to say that, in general, 4th edition wins, but in 4th edition you don't need fighters to have multiple attacks because fighter powers are equivalent to every other classes powers. The idea that rarely used magic spells are superior to what the fighter can dish out every round without fail is gone. This, I think, isn't so great of a thing.

So how would I change 3rd edition. Well, it would be nice to have the full attack be less dominant and have the general structure of an turn make more sense. You could have people with multiple attacks take half their attacks as part of a standard action and half as part of their move action. This way the difference between a standard and full attack wouldn't be so huge as 1 versus 6 attacks like in the example of the dragon.

Crafting, an alternative system

Remove the eight magic item feats and replace them with three feats. These feats are Craft Minor Magic Item (this allows you to craft any item requiring 6th level or less as a caster level requirement), Craft Medium Magic Item (requires Craft Minor Magic Item; this allows you to craft any item requiring 12th level of less as a caster level), and Craft Major Magic Item (requires Craft Medium Magic Item, this allows you to craft any item).

Magic Item creation no longer requires experience points to be spent.

Magic Items with a caster level up to 6th take 1 day to create, caster level 7th to 12th take 2 days, and caster level 13th or higher take 3 days. Creating a Staff of Power no longer takes 7 months.

Magic Items require Materia. Materia consists of alchemical reagents, mystic salves, rare herbs, sanctified incense, and so on. Materia has a gold piece value and to create an item you must spend half it's gold piece value in Materia.

Materia can have a type. This type can be anything. As a rule of thumb Materia that is brought or obtained from deconstructing magic items has no type, but Materia acquired from monsters or the environment does. The type of Materia causes it's value to double or even triple for the purpose of creating magic items. For example, Materia (Blood of a Red Dragon) would have triple value for creating a flaming sword.

Magic Items can be deconstructed and give 25% of their gold value in Materia. Deconstruction takes an hour to perform.

Slain enemies can have Materia harvested from them by characters with a magic item creation feat. This Materia has a type. This process takes a minute and must be performed within an hour of death or the Materia dissipates. It usually involves collecting some piece of the creature. For every 50 experience points the creature is worth you get 1 point of Materia. For this reason you should use Level-Independent Experience Point Rewards as noted in the Unearthed Arcana. If you are not using this there is a simple conversion at the end of this post.

Materia can be found as treasure in various places. It should be placed in special places. For example, in an ancient torture chamber you mind find stones infused with suffering as a form of Materia.

Table 5-2 on page 137 of the DMG should be used to limit how much Materia is available for purchase.

Optional: Spells that require a costly component such as pearls or diamond dust, can instead require Materia. Spells that cost experience can instead cost Materia with 1 point of experience turning into 25 points of Materia cost.

Balance Effects: This gives players much more access to magic items. It also gives them a much wider array of items to choose from. It also increases the value of any found magic item as found items will often be turned into other items.

CR / Materia
1 / 6
2 / 12
3 / 18
4 / 24
5 / 36
6 / 48
7 / 72
8 / 96
9 / 144
10 / 192
11 / 280
12 / 380
13 / 580
14 / 760
15 / 1,160
16 / 1,540
17 / 2,400
18 / 3,000
19 / 4,600
20/ 6,200

Freedom of Movement

So one thing I thought about recently was Freedom of Movement. Of the the big benefits of Freedom of Movement is that you are essentially immune to grappling. This is incredibly important because grappling, especially at higher levels, can basically be an insta-kill. People may complain about 'save or die' effects, but grappling is much worse because in many grappling checks you essentially can't win. For example, compare a Remorhaz against a 7th half-orc barbarian. The barbarian has a 22 strength using gauntlets of ogre strength. He can rage to bring his strength to 26. This gives him a total grapple of 15. The Remorhazes grapple is 23 which gives it an 8 point advantage. This gives the barbarian a19.5% chance of not getting grappled and then not getting swallowed. His companion, the halfling thief, who moves to flank has a 14 strength and a total grapply bonus of +3. He can not win. If bitten by the Remorhaz he will be automatically grappled and next round he will be swallowed and will take 8d6 per round. The examples get even more extreme as you go up levels. Big grappling creatures like dragons, purple worms, and remorhazes can grab a character extremely easily and characters have no hope of beating their grapple rolls. They can then do something horrible like fly high up in the air, dive into lava, or simply swallow the player with almost no chance of the player escaping.

So the best defense against this is the spell Freedom of Movement. It becomes available at 7th level. Rings of Free of Movement also become available at 7th level. These make you completely immune to grappling creatures. The spell lasts 10 minutes per level so it can take you through multiple encounters, but casting the spell on your entire party can drain the resources of even a high level caster so the ring is also key. This spell is one of those massive game-changers. If you have it you can survive and if not you are screwed.

What might be nice is spells and powers in the middle. For example how about a 3rd level, hour/level spell that gives you +6 grapple per size category the grapple has on you.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Milestone Recovery, my houserules

My latest houserule is as follows:

For every two combat encounters played through the players receive 1 Milestone. A Milestone can be spent to recover your level in hit points, heal 1 point of ability damage to every stat, and to recover 1/4 (rounded down) of daily abilities. Spells recovered are spell that you have already used and you do not get to select new spells. You can not go over what you would normally have and any going over your normal allotment is lost. The exception is spells. If you would recover a spell slot, you may choose to recover a lower level spell slot instead.

You may spend two Milestones to recover twice your hit points, heal 2 points of ability damage, and recover 1/2 (rounded down) of your daily abilities. Four Milestones recovers four times your hit points, 4 points of ability damage and all your daily abilities.

Milestones can be spent at any time. This includes in combat during another persons turn. For example, say that you are struck and reduced to -12 hit points. You may spend a Milestone and gain enough hit points to survivce. Or say that you are at -3 and stable for several rounds and you decide that you need to get back up. You can spend a Milestone, instantly heal and be ready to fight again.

Pros: This reduces the need for players to constantly retreat and rest. Many plots can be undermined by the players constantly being forced to leave and rest. Any kind of plot with urgency that involves multiple enocunters benefits greatly from this 'resting without resting' idea. Or any kind of plot that involves the players surviving some kind of gauntlet also benefits. It also gives the players more options and the ability to pull out more resources when needed. This system also doesn't sacrifice the whole resource management aspect of the game, just extends it.

Cons: The gives the players an extra reward for fighting encounters and may steer players towards fighting more battles that they could have otherwise avoided. Instead of confronting the enemy they might run back to a room of minions in order to get a Milestone. It also introduces the idea of fighting more battles in order to recover a specific needed ability. For example, the players teleport into a dungeon, fight some bad guy, but then need to fight more encounters to get the teleport spell back so they can leave. Also, players can do more out of combat type spells if they are fighting that day and that is a little weird. Being able to identify more items because you had several fights is odd.

The future: I initially envisioned this as getting 4 milestones every 4 encounters, but in making these rules I wanted to apply to 4th edition also where you might run more encounters. I also wanted it to be possible for players to run out of resources despite the Milestones even though it would be much harder. So I think I might change this to getting a 1/3 Milestone every 2 encounters which would be equivalent to a full rest every 6 encounters. The reason I started with a full rest every 8 encounters was to minimize any disruption to my game and get a sense of how this playtested.

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Skill Points or a Bonus to Level

A long time ago at a gaming table far away, there were two kinds of systems. There was D&D which was thought of as a 'class' based system. Your abilities were defined by what class you were and howyou progressed through that class. In response to this rigidity there were 'skill' based systems. Skill based systems allowed you to buy whatever set of skills you wanted giving you more flexibility in terms of how you built your character. As game design evolved very few systems were completely class or skill based. D&D added 'proficiencies' and then in 3rd edition had a full-fledged point based skill system that was influenced by class.

The traits of a skill system were that you had a set of skill points that you could spend on skills and this skill spending was very separate from any kind of 'level' or 'class' notion. Third edition embraced this entirely although it gave a 'class' feel by giving different classes access to different sets of skills with out of class skills costing more. Fourth edition, however, took a step away from this system and became very level focussed. I think that one of the reasons for this was that skill selection was actually the most complex part of character creation. So in fourth edition you either have a skill or not. The growth of the skill is based on your level and not any points you decide to put in it.

So what is better, having a point system where characters can move around points and have greater flexibility or to have a flat bonus which is much simpler and requires less tracking. Well, let's take a quick look at how people spend their skills in 3rd edition. Most simple choose a set of skills and keep those at the maximum possible. Typically spreading out leads to situations where your skill can not really keep up and be meaningful. Skill difficulty rolls tend to be geared towards a character that has maxed out his skill. Also since many skills are used by the party as a whole, like a knowledge skill or a search skill, the only useful skill will be the highest one in the party. Of course, many skills are individual based such as Concentration, Tumble, and Climb for example.

Another thing to consider is that in 3rd edition some skills have diminishing returns at high levels. For example, if you have 16 points in Tumble you can tumble past two opponents without having to roll. If you have 23 points in Concentration you can defensively cast any spells. Appraisal is another example. But some skills require extremely high levels in order to be useful and don't have much use if you only have a few points, notably Use Magic Device.

So one thing that should be mentioned when talking about skills is rogues. First and second edition D&D mainly had the rogue as a utility character that dealt with dungeon hazards like traps and locks. They were the only ones that posessed several key skills. One unforunate thing is these editions was that they sucked at these skills at low levels and when they started to get good at them they were far surpassed by simple spells. In 3rd edition, with a full skill system rogues became the 'skill' characters (whereas wizards and clerics were spell characters and fighters were feat characters). Now rogues have evolved. Sneak attack can make them a potentially powerful role in combat. Rogues changed from a character focussed on dungeon hazards to a damage dealing role since many of the skills they have became less of a focus. Locked doors could be chopped down with an admantium axe or opened with a knock spell. Stealth was best achieved through spells. Although not D&D, I remember playing Neverwinter Nights as a rogue with my friend playing a barbarian. It took too long to deal with traps so they barbarian would just run through them all and them rest on the other side.

Anyway, most of my posts here have always sided on the side increased flexibility, but in this case I think I might lean towards either having a skill or not with no skill points. I used to love skill points because you could use them to customize your character, and I still feel that skill selection should be a part of your character development, but there are many other factors that give you much more power to customize your character. And frankly I feel that the headache of counting skill points outweighs the benefits of having fine control of your skills since most people just max out their skills.

Ok, so some quick problems with the 4th edition skill system are that picking up new skills becomes much harder and so does picking up new languages. The way 4th edition handled this was to make new skill acquisition and new language acquisition based on feats. The issue with this is that for the most part you will want to use your feats for other things. It is true that 4th edition feats tend to be much less powerful than 3rd edition feats, but I suspect that feats will climb in power as splat books come out and few characters will want to use them for feat acquistion.

Saturday, October 18, 2008

XP Based on Level, a Failed Experiment

So one thing that 3rd edition introduced that was completely new was experience point bonuses based on the comparison of your level to the difficultly of foes you defeated. Both 3.75 and 4.0 both did away with it.

The reason it was introduced was because they wanted to give you an extra big reward for defeating things higher than your level and reduce the award for fighting weak things. Well the end effect was the same as having higher level monsters worth more and lower level monsters worth less and having sucessive levels take lots more experience.

One additional effect that some people liked was that a certain level of foe awarded no experience. So characters couldn't slaughter a herd of pigs to gain levels. Of course, this wasn't really a problem (like it would be in a MMORPG). DMs decide when and where to give experience. If a battle is completely one sided it should not be run as an encounter and if it is not run as an encounter you should not get XP. It should be handwaved away. For example, "On the road to Camelot, you encounter a handful of brigands, but hey have neither the skill nor equipment to challenge you and you disperse them with ease." Or perhaps, "Your band finds the orc village and demolishes it. The battle is so easy for you that you gain nothing from it but a handful of coins."

This shows one of the dangers of treating a pen & paper game too much like an MMORPG. You introduce unneeded complexity that is only necessary for an MMORPG that could easily handle the complexity behind the scenes.

Milestones in 3rd Edition, a Quick Fix

Okay, 3rd edition resource management is geared to have 4 meaningful encounters before being forced to rest. But guess what, a lot of times this shits on your plot. You have some sort of dramatic situation like saving a princess before she is sacrificed, but the players fight 4 encounters before the final battle to defeat the badguy and save the princess. So they leave to rest or they get their asses handed to tham because they have nothing left...

Well, since the game is geared to having 4 encounters then a rest, one solution is to give the players a free rest if they complete 4 encounters without forcing them to actually rest within the game story. Of course, this would get a little weird since battle #4 would be fought with very few resources and battle #5 would be fought with full power. But it is easy to even things out.

Ok, so here is the idea. Every encounter they earn a Milestone. Each milestone can be spent to recover 1/4 (rounded down) of the resources they would get from sleeping. Two milestones could get you 1/2 (rounded down) and 4 Milestones could give you full recovery. You could also spend those Milestones within a combat, maybe to save yourself. This would help alleviate the problem I mentioned in the previous paragraph since people would be spending Milestones in an uneven way.

One issue with this is spells. How do you handle clerics and wizards and those that have to choose a set of spells at the beginning of the day? Well one option is to allow them to choose any spells they could normally choose when resting. Another option is to only allow them to recover spells that they used. A third is to allow them to have any spell that they had memorized. The difference between the last two options is that if a wizard has a fireball memorized and has not yet cast he could not get another fireball in the first case, but could in the second.

So if you allowed in combat spending of Milestones there would be a danger. Spell selection is often a time-consuming process and high-level casters going through their list or even going through a pile of splatbooks to find the right spell for a situation could kill the pace of combat. But the idea of suddenly marshalling your resources and getting a few hit points back instead of dying or suddenly pulling a needed spell out in a dire situation does seem cool. So you could place limits on the selection such as the second option I mentioned above.

So one interesting question is do you allow them to go over? If a character has 4-4 spells and they use them up so that they have 3-1 and they then spend 2 Milestones do they go to 4-3 or 5-3? If you allowed this they would potentially be able to save up a lot spells and then go crazy in some battles. But is this really against what casters do anyway? It just extends it. Personally I would allow it only I playtested this system a little more...

Okay, a quick summary of what you get when you rest:
-You heal your level in hit points
-You heal 1 ability damage to each stat
-You regain your spells
-You regain any abilities with daily uses (like Barbarian Rage)

Save versus Attack Roll

One very interesting thing they did in 4th edition was to remove 'saving throws' and replace them with stat based attack rolls. So in 3rd you are comparing 1d20 + Base Save (as determined by class levels) + Stat Bonus + Random Feat and Magical Bonuses to 10 + Level Based Difficulty (spell level or half HD, actual very similar) + Stat Bonus + Feats and Magical Bonuses. So each factor has something on the other side that corresponds so you have the typical 1d20 > 10 roll. So instead of having the defender roll the 50% to be affected (with all other things being equal) you have the attacked do it. So to have the 4th edition attack roll behavior you add 10 to each saving throw, call it a defense and subtract 10 from every DC and have the attacker roll d20 and add in the DC.

One reason people might not like this is because it takes away the rolling of the dice. Players tend to like to roll dice. It gives them a feeling of involvement. When I GMed Champions we had many attacks that did around 10d6 damage. It became time-consuming counting up those dice and that was one major factor slowing down combat. So I made a handy little dice rolling application to speed the game, but my players weren't into it. They wanted to roll dice because it made them feel like they were in control of their fate. Most players attribute their rolls to either themselves or their dice and rarely to random probability. "I can't hit this guy!" "This die fails every time I need to make a save!" It sounds silly, but imagine playing the games craps where instead of rolling the dice you just read a display. It would be a very different experience and it would take away the illusion of control.

So if players like rolling dice and converting between +10 and +1d20 is easy you could easily switch to a system where players rolled all the dice. When they attacked they would roll an attack roll. When they were attacked by a monster they would roll a defense roll. When casting a spell they would roll a spell attack roll when being hit with one they would roll a save. The problem, you have to track player numbers and monster numbers in a slightly different way. But these numbers don't actually mix too much. A player tracks the numbers on his character sheet and a DM tracks numbers on monster statistics. Conversion is ridiculously simple since it is just subtract ten and add a d20 or vice versa.

One additional advantage I see to this is action points and die manipulation abilities. If you have action points that add a d6 to a roll or some luck ability that allows you to reroll then this allows those powers to be much more flexible.

PROS:
-Greater feeling of control
-Greater power and flexibility for 'die manipulation' type abilities

CONS:
-Two different ways to handle players versus monsters

So I guess this comes down to how hard it is to convert between adding 10 and adding d20. I don't think it would be much of an issue, because it happens when you are figuring out what to write down on your character sheet. If you got to rewrite the rules you could phrase things in terms of everything being an opposed roll where you add a bonus. Then, when you make the roll players add a d20 and monsters add 10.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Keeping Track of Things

Information can be stored in many ways and how you handle it is based on how you are going to use it. So in 3rd edition D&D you have basically 6 important numbers that you need to track. Your Armor Class, your three saves, you bonus to hit, and your damage. There are lots of ways to write this information down on your character sheet, and I've come across a few that I like that make things go easier.

First, I think breaking down a bonus is a good idea. It is always good to know what factors make your AC 24. THis will allow you to easily know how other factors will affect you. Does the +4 Deflection bonus from a spell add a full +4. You can search for what items you have that are affecting your AC or you could just check your AC line. So here is some possible AC information

AC: 25 (+1 Size, +4 Dex (+6 Limited by Armor), +2 Deflection from Magic Ring, +7 Magical Armor, +1 Natural Armor from Magical Necklace)

This makes it easy to see how other factors can affect your AC. Also you can put in things that may not affect your AC, but would if other factors changed. For example, say you have +3 Chain Mail and Bracers of Armor +3. The amor wouldn't help against Incorporeal attacks, but the bracers would. Another issue is named bonuses, you can explicitly say what bonuses have what names which makes stacking determinations easier. If you have all these factors listed out it is easier to see what your AC will be at any point. The same thing can be done with saves, and saves tend to be simpler.

I like to do hit and damage a little differently. I like the table design with each row being a different weapon and the columns being, Hit Bonus, Damage, Critical Info, and so on. I would probably add a 'break down' column to break down the hit and damage bonuses like I mentioned above for AC.

I used this (without the breakdown) for a long time. But I had a Dragonbane weapon, so I added another row for my main weapon that was "--Versus Dragons" so I didn't need to refigure things all the time. This was a really good strategy and I used this line of my table a lot more than a line for my backup handaxe or bow. So it is also good for people with options. For example, adding a line for "--Smiting" is useful. Or maybe you sometimes use a weapon one-handed or two-handed. If you have Power Attack you might want to put down your favorite power attack choices. If you regularly get certain magical buffs you might want to have a line that represents your bonuses when you have that buff. You could go overboard and you don't really want a huge table that you have to scroll through, but a mid or high level character should probably have at least 5 lines that represent the most common attack scenarios. This will reduce the math you have to do each time you attack and can help speed up the game.

Anyway, the general idea is that you want to arrange your characters information in such a way that it makes play easy. Doing this can make managing your character much easier. Remember that it is fine to repeat information in multiple places as long as things are clear and you prevent conflicting information.

Monday, October 13, 2008

Golden Ratio

No, I don't mean (a+b)/a=a/b. I mean the ratio of how many hit points a character has versus how much damage is done versus how much healing is done per round. You could think of this on a party basis or on a character basis. For ease, let's call the three numbers, H (hit points), D (damage taken), and R (recovering hit points). Balancing these factors has a lot of impact on the feel of the game.

Okay, let's look at H versus D. If H is much higher than D you have combats that will go on a long time. If R is also high dropping something will be difficult since after a long time a combatant can easily heal up all that damage. So if H > D then R will have to go down and healing becomes less important. On the other hand if D is higher then combats will be fast and combatants will easily be dropped so R must compensate. This leads to very swingy combat where large heals are crucial so without steady healing combatants will drop like flies.

Okay, now let's compare D versus R. If R > D then you have a situation where healing can outpace damage. It becomes difficult to drop a foe so it must be possible to drop a foe before they can get healed. So the H has to go down. Conversely when D > R, healing essentially just slows down D and it is still a race to see how runs out of hit points first instead of who runs out of healing.

So H versus R isn't too complex. When H > R you have unimportant healers and when R > H you have important healers.

So one issue is in a battle, what resource are you draining? Are you trying to reduce the number of hit points of your foe, to consume all their healing, kill them between heals, or simply have your damage outperform their healing?

Another thing to consider is that these values H,D,R may be different for characters and monsters. For example, monsters may not have the ability to heal and will instead have high hit points while players would have this ability giving the players an edge.

Let's look quickly at World of Warcraft cause many of these ideas and represented in that game. In this game for the characters R >H, meaning that healing is very important. A character with no healer backing him will die fairly quickly. Characters die because they either run out of healing resources, die too fast to be healed, or when D >R and they simply take too much damage for the high levels of healing to match. For monsters it is different, monsters in WoW tend to not be able to heal and often have very high hit points. So it is a struggle to slowly grind down a huge pool of monster hit points while using healing to keep your characters alive.

So how does D&D work? How does it change over levels? How did they change things in 4th edition? Let's look at why characters die:
1) They run out of healing resources
2) They are killed between heals
3) They take damage until they die and heals are only able to slow this process down

Case #1: Running out of healing resources.
Theoretically, D&D is structured so that this is rarely a reason for dying. You should be able to fight 4 encounters and all resources are daily and not encounter resources. So the only time you are supposed to run out of healing resources is when you have used up a lot in previous battles. Now anyone who has actually played 3rd edition D&D at moderate to high levels knows that this really isn't true. Battles can often consume you healing resources. At low levels this happens because you have very limited healing resources and at high levels you often have to churn out so much healing that you can quickly exhaust what you can do. What will typically happen is that one battle won't consume all your healing resources, but enough so that further battles are difficult because you simply don't have those resources.

Case #2: Killed between heals.
Typically you have only one or two healer characters and they may not be able to heal you or reach you for a heal. A lot of damage or a tactical situation can easily make this a possibility. This is possible because D > H and characters often face foes that can kill them in just a few rounds.

Case#3: Damage Taken Outpaces Heals
This also happens, but as healing becomes powerful it typically combines with case #1. You use up all your most powerful heals and your weak heals can't keep up. This situation increases as you gain levels since your weak heals can't keep pace with enemy damage while your strong heals can easily keep up.

So how do you want characters to fail? Which of these situations should be claiming characters lives? Well, in past posts I have always wanted to choose flexibility, and this is no different. You want to have players die because of all three of these situations. So in a way D&D is doing okay, but here is one thing I would change. I would make healing resources more encounter based that would help eliminate the vast divergence between battles where you have plenty of healing resources and those where you don't. Actually weakening the in combat healing, but making it so that you didn't need to worry so much about conserving resources would be useful in my mind. But you also want daily based resources as well. A lot of this has been mulled over in previous posts. This way battles can be about running down or outpacing healing resources without crippling the parties abilities to continue after the battle.

So where did 4th edition go? Well, they made the observation that only a few characters could heal and healing ending up dominating their actions. Those who could do a decent job healing alos were forced to do nothing but heal. Wizards also seemed to feel that healing was not fun job. So they made everyone capable of healing and somewhat reduced the importance of healing. I have not gotten a chance yet to play much 4th edition so I can't really say for certain how healing plays out but I am guessing that it shifts people dying from case #2 to case #1. It is fairly easy to heal significant amounts, but no healing remotely compares to the high level healing of 3rd edition. But the number of heals is fairly limited. Each character can use a healing surge once. Leader characters can allow a sizeable increase in healing, but resource wise I am guessing they can not keep up with damage. So R goes down and D goes down as well. So it becomes more about grinding up hit points faster than the other guy then round to round super-heals.

So is this good? Well, yes if you want healing to take more of a backseat role. So if you feel like you want this the steps of reducing the power of healing as well as reducing the specialized role of healer is probably what you want to do.

Some other approaches to the reduction of the healing role were used in the game Age of Conan. You could make all healing something that a healer does only a few times in combat. Then they would be able to do other stuff. For example, a healer would cast his heal spell. For the next 3 rounds everybody would heal 10 points, but additional castings of this spell would do nothing. Another technique was tying healing to damage. Certain characters healed their allies in an amount based on the damage they did. Another possible technique is using the encounter based mana points I mentioned in a previous post. Healers couldn't heal every turn since some turns would be spent getting mana back. The only problem with this is that healers wouldn't be able to cast non-healing spells while regenerating mana for healing.

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Unified Powers Mechanic

So one of the major changes in the 4.0 rules is the creation of a single power mechanic. Every class has the same kind of number of encounter and daily powers. Each has a couple additional powers beyond these that give the class flavor. This differs from 3rd edition where there are different power mechanics. Spell casters have spells, barbarians have rages, fighters and rogues tend to have no limit on the powers they use.

So is a switching to a single mechanic a good thing? What are the advantages and disadvantages?

First I want to take a quick look at World of Warcraft. This MMORPG has essentially 3 power mechanics. They have a 'mana point' system where you recover mana points when not using them and you spend mana points to perform actions. They also have a 'rage' system where you acquire rage by doing and taking damage. You then spend rage like you would mana. The third system is 'combo' points. Certain classes have powers that cause targets to accumulate 'combo' points. These classes also have 'finishing moves' whose effects vary based on the number of combo points applied. In addition to these mechanisms all three systems include the notion of a cooldown. Once you use an ability you have to wait a certain amount of time before you use another ability and a certain amount of time before you use that particularly ability. D&D has seen some hints of cooldowns and mana points, but unfortunately I have seen very little use of rage or combo point mechanics.

So World of Warcraft, a much more balance conscious game than D&D, has managed to maintain multiple power mechanics so have differing systems isn't inherently unbalanced or anything. But obviously how these mechanics are designed can have a large impact.

One issue about the power mechanics in 3rd edition is encounter durability. Fighters and rogues generally have no abilities that are used up during an encounter. They just take damage that is fairly easy to heal between combats. Wizards and clerics, however, have no abilities that aren't used up during an encounter. Typically you run into a situation where a party has to decide whether to push on and the fighters and rogues are fine to push on, but the spell casters are begging to stop. This isn't horrible, but it is a notable outcome out these varying power mechanics.

Let's look at melee versus spells in another way. (I am ignoring other resourced effects because they essentially are like spells for the most part.) Imagine a 2D graph with the y-axis being how useful you and the x-axis being encounters. Melee fighters would be like a flat horizontal line. They have about the same use in each encounter. Spell casters would a a spikey line. For some encounters they would be more useful and for others they might be less useful. This isn't really a problem in my mind. If you get to shine sometimes and take a backseat other times it is okay, but what will often happen is that the spell casters will 'blow their wad'. They will be more focussed on being effective than on nebulous resource management issues. They will want to do useful things every round. So the graph will then have the spell casters well above the melee for early encounters and then well below it for later encounters. But at this crossing point the spell casters will want to take an extended rest.

I am kind of all over the place in this post, but I want to get back to the idea of a single unified mechanics for powers. I think it has advantages and disadvantegs. It makes your game less complex, but often complexity in the mechanics of a game makes the game interesting. Many D&D players actually enjoy the complexity of the game. But an overly complex game is also bad and can easily become slow and the pace suffers.

I think the problem with the single mechanic of fourth edition is that it is so frelling boring and simplistic. An interesting and flexible mechanic would have been great, but the universal mechanic is the so mindless. You have X powers you can each use once per encounter and Y powers that you can each use once per day. Each class actually builds on this a little built. Wizards actually get a little bit of choice, some abilities allow you to recover powers, but the fundamental mechanic is just ridiculously simple.

So I actually think a universal mechanic isn't necessarily bad, but it should be one that has more flexibility. Here is an example of one. You have 'points'. Using an ability costs a certain number of points. Different abilities cost a different number of points. You recover point either at the end of an encounter or at the end of the day. This gives you a lot more flexibility to have different classes handle the system differently. To go back to the warcraft example, wizards could recover points every round while a warrior might get a point every time he hits or is hit.

This post kind of mentally wandered, but I guess I just wanted to make the point in the first sentence of the preceding paragrah.

Durations!

One thing that 3rd edition simplified and 4th edition got rid of was durations. In 1st and 2nd edition each spell had a unique duration and a unique range. In 3rd edition that got rid of these fairly meaningless distinctions and basically gave spells one of four duration (round/level, minute/level, 10 minutes/level, and hour/level) and one of three ranges (close, medium, long). Fourth edition wanted to be even simpler and removed durations completely. Fourth edition replaced durations with several things. One is that most beneficial effects only last a single round. Negative effects last until the victim makes a saving throw. And some effects are maintained by spending a minor action maintaining them. Certain abilties like a 'stance' just gives a benefit the entire encounter.

So clearly 4th edition went to some effort to remove the tracking of durations. But is it worth it? The notion was that tracking durations was something extra you had to track in combat and that slowed things down. I use a javascript intiative tracking tool to track durations. It makes things extremely easy, but it also demonstrates some things. Any minute per level spell basically lasts the entire combat. The 10 minutes per level spells last for several combat and the hour per level spells effectively last the whole day of adventuring. And at a certain level the round per level spells usually last the entire combat. So what calls do I need to make. Because of my tracking tool tracking durations is easy. So the calls I need to make are whether a spell that they cast is still on for a later fight. Frankly I don't see these calls as particularly difficult to make.

So although I actually like the systems fourth edition uses to replace durations, I don't see durations as such a horrible thing. The only thing that irks me is one round buffs in 4th edition, but I suppose this forces coordination and teamwork since your buff only affects your allies and you want them to use their best attacks during that one round.

Sunday, October 5, 2008

Residuum and Magic Item Crafting

The idea of crafting magic items has slowly evolved from 1st edition D&D. Originally, it was very ill defind and basically left to the DM. I remember having my wizard collect various bits of magical creatures he fought. It was a lot of fun to later forge rings of fire resistence from hell hound tongues I had gathered. In fact, this was the funnest item creation that I can remember in a game and I have had thoughts about how to bring more of this kind of thing into the game. Right now, magic item creation seems to be more focussed on reading through a boatload of supplements and dumping a pile of gold. Most of this reason for this is expediency. If you want your characters to be able to create items and not have that be the focus of the story it is easy to get into this situation.

Anyway, 3rd edition introduced crafting. You spent experience and gold in order to create items. I assume the idea behind experience was because they wanted item creation to involve a serious sacrifice, but as game experience showed that gold acquisition was the real limiting factor the whole experience thing was tossed out by both 3.75 and 4.0.

One thing I really don't like about crafting is that it can get flavorless. You simply expend time and money and you have an item. The alternative is that you add some requirements like possessing an outfitted laboratory or being able to buy rare ingredients. This is much cooler in my mind, but can often place unplanned limitations of item creation that is often required for balanced play.

So what do I like and dislike in various rules? I think abandoning experience costs is fine. I like the fact that 4.0 allows you to craft items quickly. Taking months to craft an item in 3rd could get irritating and limiting in terms of plot. I like the whole notion of Alchemical Reagents, Mystic Salves, Rare Herbs, Sanctified Incense, and Residuum introduced by 4.0. I liked the idea of deconstructing magic items in order to acquire their essence for use in crafting other items. Of course that may be cause I play World of Warcraft where this is common practice. Speaking of Warcraft it has a fairly nice crafting system where you need to purchase or acquire a list of rare materials and this can often be difficult or time-consuming. Unfortunately, such a system does not translate well in a pen & paper game.

The game Ars Magica used to have a system where you could find raw magic. Since the game was based around powerful wizards who could just conjure up gold the whole raw magic system was basically the treasure they could receive. I really like this idea. It combines well with a more fiction based concept of forging magic items from rare materials like a dragon's hide. Frankly, dragon's hide just being plate mail a druid can wear in 3.5 is kind of disappointing. It also is like the MMORPG way where some monsters may drop magical materials useful in crafting.

So going back to my old wizard who collected body parts of various monsters. I would institute a system where Residuum could be gathered from defeated foes or could be taken as treasure from interesting places. For example, if your adventure takes you into the heart of a volcanno you might be able to collect some of the primal energy of the volcanno to use in crafting items. This Residuum could also be 'typed', meaning that you would record where you got it. This typed Residuum could possibly have a greater effect when creating a magic item. Blood from a doppleganger might be more useful crafting a hat of disguise. Or the types of Residuum could have unforeseen effects on the item you created, to help turn items into possible story elements and interesting game effects. For example, suppose you craft your +3 Sword from the bones of demons, perhaps the sword retains some demonic properties and unnerves animals and children or something or maybe it drinks it the blood that it spills always remaining clean.

One effect from this is that more things will drop treasure. Sometimes it doesn't make sense for a creature to have treasure and a long string of these can cause the players to be unusually poor. But if Residuum can be taken from every creature then monsters always supply some form of reward. One danger in this is the possibility of killing massive numbers of weak creatures in order to harvest Residuum, but this could also theoretically be a story element. If you can gain 1gp of Residuum by murdering a farmer this opens the reason for bad guys to really be very bad....

Another part of item creation in 3.5 is feats. I think the dizzying array of feats required is kind of annoying. In one game I replaced these feats with 3 feats in a chain. If you have the first you could make items up to a certain powerf level and subsequent feats allowed you to create better items. I felt like this worked much better than having crafters who could make wands but not rings. But the total removal of feat requirements is fine by me also.

Varying requirements was something also removed by 4th edition. In 3rd edition to create a ring of feather fall you needed to be able to cast feather fall. Fourth edition did away with this. Anyone could craft anything. Frankly I like the requirements. It makes the act of creation seem more story like and less like buying something at a shop. You need to actually do something or have some power to create an item.

One thing I tried in the past was to have a skill roll involved in magic item creation, but I wasn't crazy about how it turned out. The expenditure of materials made it too much of a big risk and players became very cautious.

So that is what I like and dislike. I might make a more full-fledged system later on.

Skill Reduction

I remember the first time I realized that more skills wasn't necessarily better. I was looking at a Rolemaster expansion that adding 'skiing' as a skill. I realized that no one would ever take this because there were so many other skills that were more important and despite the number of skills growing the number of skill points did not. Defining skiing as a skill simply made it so people couldn't ski.

So both 3.75 and 4.0 D&D have reduced the number of skills. I want to quickly recap what they did and maybe make a few comments about what they did.

3.75
1) Combine Jump, Tumble, and Balance into a new skill Acrobatics
2) Combine Concentration and Spellcraft
3) Combine Forgery, Dechiper Script, and Speak Languages into a new skill Linguistics
4) Combine Gather Information with Diplomacy
5) Combine Hide and Move Silently into a new skill Stealth
6) Combine Listen, Spot, and Search into a new skill Perception
7) Combine Open Lock and Disable Device
8) Remove Rope Use

4.0
1) Combine Tumble, Balance, Escape Artist into a new skill Acrobatics
2) Combine Climb, Jump, Swim into a new skill Athletics
3) Combine Listen, Spot, and Search into a new skill Perception
4) Combine Hide and Move Silently into a new skill Stealth
5) Combine Disable Device, Open Lock, and Sleight of Hand into a new skill Thievery
6) Added Endurance
7) Turn Gather Information into Streetwise
8) Turn Sense Motive into Insight
9) Turn Knowledges into 4 Fixed Skills: Arcana, Religion, Dungeoneering, Nature and merge in Survival and Handle Animal
10) Remove Appraise, Concentration, Craft, Decipher Script, Disguise, Forgery, Perform, Profession, Spellcraft, Use Magic Device, Use Rope
11) Speak Languages and Ride moved into Feat mechanics

So the two systems share some changes. Both consolidate skills into Stealth and Perception. Both turned Open Locks and Disable Device into a single skill. But fourth edition went much farther. Part of this is because they removed many game mechanics like disrupting a spell or using a magical device that you normally wouldn't be able to use. They also got rid of the 'open' skills like Knowledge and Profession. These skills had a specific component i.e. Knowledge Engineering or Profession Blacksmith. This makes them a little harder to handle because written adventures can't really take these into account well. They are more for open-ended games where a character wants to be good at something. But for something like a defined skill challenge these don't fit in. For example, you are trying to get some information from a blacksmith and a character wants to use their Profession Blacksmithing to form a bond with the blacksmith. This is perfectly reasonable, but it is difficult to write the skill challenge or even balance the skill challenege unless you know what skills a character possesses. Having open-ended skills is an entry point for chaos!

So are open-ended skills bad? I don't really think so. I think they add flavor, but they should always be neat little additions instead of game required skills. In D&D Knowledge (Arcana), Knowledge (Religion), Knowledge (Planes), and so on became standards. I don't think there should be standard skills like these. These skills should be moved into full-fledged skills like in fourth edition. But this doesn't mean you shouldn't have the open-ended skills also. Instead of having Craft, Profession, Knowledge, and Perform I would just have a single skill called Extra and then the player could have the skill be anything like Blacksmith, Story Teller, or Sailor. These skills could be rolled in special situations and could be used as assisting skills for other tasks. For example a Blacksmithing roll might give you +2 open your roll for knowledge about iron golems.

Saturday, October 4, 2008

Tanking! Brilliance in 4th Edition!

So one very nice element they added in 4th edition was the notion of tanking. Tanking is the act of one character who is harder to kill via armor class, hit points, and so on, taking the brunt of the enemy attack. Traditionally in D&D this means simply getting in front of the spell casters making it so monsters would have to go around to attack them. MMORPGs changed this concept. This built in the idea the tanks had special powers that caused monsters to focus on them. Complex mechanics grew up around a character keeping a monster attacking him. This basic mechanic has been enormously successful in MMORPGs and is a major element of the teamwork involved.

Fourth edition copied this concept and brought tanking to the world of D&D with the 'Defender' role. These classes were given at will powers that allowed them to focus on a target. This target would then suffer some consequence for not attacking the character. Also in the ability lists of these classes are special skills used to control the battle field so that they are the primary focus of attacks. Of course ironically, due to the armor rules and hit points number, the need for a tanking class is actually diminished.

Anyway, I think this is a great piece of game design and it was a good idea to incorporate it into 4th edition. Simple ways to add it to 3rd are to simply add 'Combat Challenge' and 'Divine Challenge' to the abilities of fighters and paladins. Of course these classes have several other abilities that focus on this aspect, but even just these two abilites would be useful.

Quick Thoughts on Encounter Based Spell Limitations

Here is one idea I had for a spell system. These ideas are pretty rough and would need to be refined. They are essentially inspired by the idea of encounter powers and rituals, but lean more towards third edition D&D.

So each spell caster has a certain number of spells points. Let's say they have the number of spell points needed to cast their highest level spell. Let's use a 12th level caster as an example. He has 6 spell points. Casting a spell requires it's level in spell points. Every round of fighting he recovers half his total spell points. In our example this would be 3 points. The effect is that he could cast a 6th level spell right off and then constantly be casting 3rd levels spells, but to cast another spell above 3rd he would have to either not cast or to cast a 1st or 2nd level spell. You could even adjust this by changing the recharge rate up or down. This is a potential way to limit spell casting inside of combat and would allow encounter based resource limitations instead of daily limitations.

So what effects on game balance would this have? Well, you could say that spell casters would be much more powerful because they wouldn't have to hold anything in reserve for other battles. They could cut loose. Or you could say that they would be much weaker because they wouldn't be able to casts the same amount of spells in a battle as they normally would. They can't simply pull out all their big guns immediately. So at some point I would like to try and experiment with this. You could try modifications like having the mage's base level of spell points being half their maximum castable spell level and they have to spend 'charging' actions to artificially raise this number.

Okay, so two aspects kind of screw this up. One is healing. Players would be able to heal like crazy between fights and be full up. Well, in 3rd edition between combat healing is something the rules seem a little schizophrenic on. Sometimes it seems like they are trying to vastly limit between combat healing like having a ring of regeneration require 15th level to craft and give you points by the hour. But the preferred method of out of combat healing seems to be Wands of Cure Light Wounds and Wands of Lesser Restoration. These two easily crafted, fairly cheap wands basically make out of combat healing a non-issue after you hit mid levels. In fact, between combat healing goes from a major limiting factor to a non-issue incredibly quickly. Fourth edition gives you much more healing and allows easy healing out of combat, but it does have a daily limit and this effectively is much more of a limit than a sack full of wands.

So let's just say that we don't need to really limit out of combat healing. But what about non-combat spells. If you have unlimited access to spells like Knock or Teleport, that is going to have drastic impacts on your game. So you could have some kind of daily spell points as well and you would mark of non-combat spells off of this resource. This, of course, requires you to figure out what is a non-combat spell and this can get a little difficult. What about dimension door? This whole resource, of course, doesn't need to be as tighly monitored as combat resources and can be done relatively loosely. Also, if you introduce this option you can say that certain spells require encounter based points and daily points. Maybe your highest level spells require both types.

Now some people may be thinking, "ZOMG, tracking 2 numbers!!!" Yeah, you do have to track a couple more numbers, but I don't think that it would be particularly bundersome since the normal system makes you track the contents of a list. For a 20th level caster you are technically tracking 9 numbers. Also, it is a tool to get away from the beast of Vancian magic and move the strategy for spell casters from a spell slot selection game that can take quite a while before you are playing to more of a strategy based thing where you make decisions based on planning for the next rounds.

Good Versus Evil and Law Versus Chaos

The D&D Game was greatly impacted by the popular fantasy authors of the time when D&D was first being developed. Among those are Tolkien and Moorcock. Tolkien's fantasy revolved around a colossal war between forces that were unmistakably good and those that were unmistakably bad. Moorcock's stories focussed on a similar conflict between forces of law and forces of chaos. Law and chaos was kind of a re-imagined good and evil that allowed in some moral ambiguity. Just because Elric worshipped a chaos god did not necessarily make him a bad guy. D&D reflected these authors by having an alignment system. They incorporated both Good versus Evil and Law versus Chaos building a kind of crazy set of alignments and matching cosmology. This was spread throughout the game and many abilities and spells focussed on this. And because so mechanics focussed on this divide it forced certain questions to be asked.

Is a merchant who swindles people evil? Can a paladin detect that? If he is evil is it okay to kill him? It is okay to kill goblin women and children because they are evil? Can a goblin child really be considered evil? Is evil a learned behavior? Is it right or wrong to scan a town for evil and then kill anyone who is evil? You should be able to ignore complex moral issues when you play D&D, but the mechanics actually force you to consider them. Fiction has the luxury of glossing over these issues, but in an RPG you have less control of how things progress and can be forced into these questions by the actions of players.

When a person picks an alignment it often too much about class requirements and how alignment based magical abilities will effect him. Personality of a character doesn't really need any sort of alignment axis in order to be defined or developed.

So fourth edition reduced the dizzying array of alignments to 5: Lawful Good, Good, Evil, Chaotic Evil, and Unaligned. But who cares? There aren't any alignment based effects so alignment has no effect and has become something that only affects army formation in the miniatures game. They essentially removed this element from the game, and put in some vestige to keep fans from complaining.

Personally I am not necessarily for or against the inclusion of alignment. I don't like 3rd edition alignment because so much of the game forces it's use and I don't like fourth edition because it removes it as an option.

So what would I do? Since 'good versus evil' is often a fantasy element and is tied to so much of the source material I would keep alignments with a Good, Evil, and Unaligned. You don't really need more. Some people may argue that their characters outlook can only be characterized by Lawful Neutral or Chaotic Good, but who cares. Roleplay your character how you want, the alignments only matter for alignment based magical effects. Everyone is Unaligned excepts characters who have divine power. Their alignment is based on the alignment of their deity. Angelic creatures are good while Devils, Demons, Slaads, and so on are Evil. Undead are also all evil. All alignment based powers treat everyone as neutral. This greatly reduces the power of many spells and abilities like Smite as they become anti-undead, anti-demon abilities. This makes evil a fundamental force of the universe and not a moral puzzle. You can even have interesting elements like Evil characters that are actually good like a demon who feels compassion like Angel the vampire or a character like Elric of Melnibone who draws power from Chaos but mainly does battle with the powers of Chaos. You can also have clerics of a good god who are corrupt.

Friday, October 3, 2008

Tracking and Bookkeeping

One of the great difficulties of D&D is that you have to track a lot of data. Tracking initiative and then tracking multiple conditions, buffs, battlefield effects each with their own effects, stacking behavior, and durations. So many times I have seen people trying to figure out what armor class they hit after figuring in a stack of conditions, buffs, and debuffs.

This is obviously difficult and a hassle. So how to fix it? There are essentially two approaches. One, make everything easier. Or two, develop clever ways to track things. Fourth edition took the first approach to an extreme. The Paizo edition didn't do much in this regard, but did do a couple things to make it easier like only allowing 3 buffs to work. (No more buffing marathons where players spend 30 minutes figuring out what they are going to do to buff themselves)

I think one thing about 4th edition is that it has been over-simplified. The designers wanted everything to be easy so they built extremely standardized mechanics. In my opinion the better way to handle complexity would have been to find better ways to manage it instead of tossing it out. With the increasing presence of laptops and other computing devices at the gaming table you have the opportunity to manage things via a program. Even without that, there are ways to handle things with tracking practices, cards and tokens, and so on.

Several years ago I wrote a java applet to handle initiative. A friend then built a javascript version that had some nice features and was more usable. I now use that to track initiative. This tool has made handling initiative much easier, but I have heard of other tricks to make this easier such as using a stack of cards. Another thing that happens in my games is that when the players begin to cast buff spells one person lists all the beneficial effects on a blackboard. That way it is easier to calculate the effects of those multiple buffs.

I would have liked to see more of an effort by Wizards of the Coast to create better ways to handle complexity with various tools and techniques than to simply remove as much complexity as possible from the game. If I were working at Wizards I would propose a simple set of web-based tools that would help every game, like an initiative, condition, and encumbrance trackers. You could offer these free and advertise on the site.

Wizards is the company the made it's way in the world by developing card games where all sorts of tracking information is contained in where and how you place a card and what tokens you place on it, so I would think they could aim some of that experience at managing D&D.

Cursed Items and Item Identification

Another piece of the game removed by 4th edition D&D is cursed items. The Paizo 3.75 followed suit and removed cursed items from the game. Both editions also made item identification much easier. These two topics are inextricably linked. Cursed items typically come from using a magic item without having first identified it. So the danger of cursed items relates directly to how easy it is to identify items. The whole subject relates to how mysterious and powerful items are (a subject I talked about in a previous post).

So do cursed items add anything to the game? A long time ago the way characters handled magical treasure was to equip it and see what happens. In this world magic items were a little more mysterious, back before these items moved into the Player's Handbook. Sometimes these items would be cursed and the players would have to suffer the effects. With changes in the game players act differently. They tend to not use magic items unless identified. A lot of this is because they would have to swap out a known good effect for an unknown effect. Also there is a basic level of caution that has developed. But are cursed items fun? Do they model fiction well? I think curses can be fun, but they tend to be very negative for a very innocent action of wielding a weapon or slipping on a ring. Fiction has an assortment of curses, but they tend not to simply be objects that are crappy that you have to use. Typically they are much more sinister and story driven. So in essence, a weapon that appears to be a +3 sword but then is actually a -3 sword that you can't not use isn't that much fun. But a +3 sword that hungers for the blood of your friends that will make you have a 1 in 10 chance of attacking an adjacent ally can be pretty cool. How about a magical stone that also shows up on your person and seems to attract undead enemies. Cursed items, in my mind, require even more thought than normal magic items, but they can be fun and arbitrarily removing them from the game is a mistake since it is something that limits the game.

To make cursed items possible you have to make identifying either hard or imprecise. Identification tends to make life easier. If you have ever run a game where every time you ask a player's armor class they respond with something like "not including any magical bonuses from these boots and that ring..." you know that it is covenient. Also identification lets characters use their treasure. Many times in 3.5 characters will pick up treasure that could immediately be useful. This can be plot based. Every cultist has a ring of electrical resistence to handle a trap later on. But in most cases characters will just toss unidentified items in a bag and won't use them until the next adventure. So keeping item identification easy is a good thing in my mind.

So making item identification imprecise seems a possibility. Both 3.75 and 4.0 have tied item identification to a skill instead of a spell. I think this is great because it makes it easy to do and it is something you could do in the middle of an adventure. Another reason why this is good it because you can assign a difficultly to things. For example, in the case above a simple normal roll can tell the basic properties of an item, but maybe a very high roll would be required to tell you if an item is cursed. This way you could not only have cursed items, but items could always remain mysterious because they would never be fully identified.

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Action Point Mistakes

In the game I am currently DMing, I decided to use Action Points. In previous games I had tried them and used the variants found in Unearthed Arcana. I found them to be massively overpowered and wanted to change them to something that PCs could use to keep from dying. So I made the following ways to spend them:

1) A single point adds a d6 to a roll.
2) Two points can be used to recover a spent ability like a spell slot.
3) Three points can be used to negate a critical. A critical instead becomes a normal hit.
4) Four points makes a save.

The point of these changes was to increase the survivability of the players, but in retrospect I feel they were a mistake. The ability to spend 2 points to recover an ability proved to be a problem because not every daily usage class ability is even. Extremely powerful use per day powers could be whipped out too regularly. Once the cleric gained Heal he was essentially unkillable as long as he had Action Points. He could make any save that would take his ability to cast a spell and he could cast a Heal if he took a lot of damage. The only way for him to be beaten was to really kill him in a single round.

Also the characters essentially became immune to save or die abilities. It was my intention that these kind of powers not decimate the characters with a few bad rolls, but these horrible abilities essentially became a non threat. Spell casters became much less of a threat than melee types.

So in retrospect I would not use this system again. I had the following idea that I think I may try next time I run a game. You can add 1d6 to a roll by spending 1 point. After that if you wish you can add another 1d6 by spending 2 points. And then another with 4, 8, 16, and so on. Of course, I would probably use this in conjunction with changes to death effects that I mentioned in a previous post.

Monday, September 29, 2008

One of many concerns about 4e...

Disclaimer: I haven't actually played 4e yet---just read the core books and FR Campaign Setting/Player's Handbook.
I think you all know about my views on 4e, so I will not go into them here on Will's Blog---except for this one point.
Teleportation...
I am not sure how/why this happened, but 4e seems to allow virtually EVERYONE access to some type of teleportation. So many feats/powers/PC Paths provide teleportation abilities that it is daunting.
Firstly---from a role playing aspect---it really stretches the willing suspension of disbelief. I have always held that Teleportation is related to magic---but when it gets lumped in with mundane abilities and classes, it looses its flavor. If a fighter in full plate can teleport 3 squares in a turn... it just seems a bit silly.
Second---I think it would turn roll-playing combat into a logistical nightmare. If everyone can teleport, then having toe-to-toe encounters gets less likely (which would be a shame both for flavor and expediency of combat). Also---when PC's and DM's have many, many options for movement---combat can get veeeerrryyy sloooowwww. 'Hmm maybe I will move here and attack, or jump over there and attack, or over there... Hmm...'
Anyway---as I have said I haven't actually sat down for a session of 4e, and the reality may be very different---but this is one issue with 4e that really stuck out for me as odd and poor game mechanics.

Resource Management

It may sound a little strange, but one major aspect of D&D is resource management. When you engage in battle you use spells and other powers and lose hit points. During the battle you have to decide what abilities you want to use. Many of these abilities when used can not be used again, like a spell slot. After the battle you have to decide what you want to do based on what abilities you still have access to. This whole resource management aspect is a major part of D&D. So it is important to examine how this resource managment affects the game. What does it add to play? What does it take away?

Typically adventures are broken down into periods between long rests. A long rest is basically a full night's sleep. Each period between long rests is typically broken down into encounters. So there are basically 3 types of resources: resources you regain after resting for the night, resources you regain after an encounter, and resources that when used are gone permanently. One of the great limitations in the design of 3.5 that was carried on to 3.75 was ignoring resources you regain after an encounter. This one a major design improvement added in 4.0 and using that aspect in previous editions could be a great improvement. Technically there are also resources that are handled over multiple days like hit points, ability scores that have been damaged, disease effects, rare class/item abilities that are used on a per week/fortnight/month/et cetera basis rather than a daily basis. But for the most part the three categories I mentioned are good for examining resource use.

So why do we have daily resources? Wouldn't it be nice to start every encounter with full resources. You would never have to leave a dungeon right before confronting the horrible cult leader about to sacrifice the innocent girl because you used up resources on the minions. Hard encounters at the end wouldn't be harder because you had a hard time dealing with previous encounters. But what do we give up? If every encounter is met by the players with the smae resources they will all have to be closer in difficulty. The minions and the cult leader will have to be roughly equal in difficulty since the players will hit them with the same resources. You would lose the ability to whip out some super special ability for hard fights, or even some moderately special ability. For some out of combat abilities it would get silly. For example, knock and teleport. If you had those without any daily limit locks and travel would instantly become a non-issue. So it is clear that having daily limits on abilities is a good thing.

So I mentioned above that I thought resources that recover after an encounter were a good idea. What are the advantages and disadvantages? The advantage is having resources you can use in an encounter without having to worry about saving them. For example, you have a wizard who either blows his abilities on an easy encounter because otherwise he would not be doing anything or he simply does nothing. If you have many encounters lined up for whatever reason, most likely plot reasons, resource users like casters tend to have trouble. It would be useful for all classes to have meaningful things they can do in an encounter without having to worry about gimping themselves later on.

One of the disadvantages of encounter based resources that I touched on earlier is that they don't work well for non-combat powers. Fourth edition solved this by completely separating out combat and non-combat powers. And non-combat powers all use permanent resources instead of daily resources. Non-combat powers can't be used in combat and encounter powers can only be used onve every 5 minutes. This, in my mind, is horrible. It limits things significantly. The use of a non-combat power could easily be a part of combat like casting Knock on a locked door or setting or some sort of defensive ward as warriors hold off a orde of goblins. And the use of encounter powers outside of combat is also limited. What if I want to use an ice spell to cool a red hot floor so I can pass. Well, unless your at-will power is cold, you can't do this either.

So recognizing that encounter based resource work well for some things but not for everything, how would I try and make 3.5 better. I would try to include limited encounter based powers. For example, you could split a wizards spells into a class that recovers after every encounter and a class that is used up. Or maybe you could have some percentage of a wizards spell be recovered after every encounter. You could recover 50% of all the combat slots you used. One concern is that this tends to make spell casters much better by removing some of the limitations, but this change wouldn't make them more powerful within a combat, just more useful across multiple combats.

Another issue is healing. Healing is kind of both combat and non-combat so how do you handle it. Well, realistically most 3.5 D&D parties will stock up on cure light wounds and even lesser restoration wands and will solve between combat healing. Only low level parties are limited by healing, and in this case they are massively over-limited. A kobold gets a lucky shot in and your group has to retreat and abandon those kidnapped townsfolk. In my mind it would be fine to say that a cleric can fully heal you between combats. In medium to high level games characters can do that with wands anyway. In low level games it makes continuing past more than one or two encounters possible.

In fourth edition, they introduced the concept of 'milestones'. You get a milestone for every two encounters you complete. In my mind this is potentially a very useful mechanism that was only minorly used in 4.0. What if you introduced this mechanism into 3.5 and said that characters could spend milestones to regain certain abilities. Maybe a caster could recover their level in spell levels for each milestone. A Barbarian could get back a rage at the cost of a milestone. I think a mechanism like this would be a good way to even out the parties power level between encounters and allow them to go longer without being forced to engage in a plot disrupting break while still having the basic limitations that are in place.

Since resource management is such a big topic in D&D I will probably write more on this subject later and may flesh out a 'Milestone Reward' system that would award spell casters with more durability and would reward non-spell casters with something like special stunts they could perform.

Friday, September 26, 2008

Encumbrance

One of the least actually tracked things on a character sheet is encumbrance. In D&D, a character is limited to carry a certain amount of gear based on their strength. Carry too much gear and you start suffering from penalties. In practice what happens is this is largely ignored except for perhaps character creation or when the character wants to haul away something especially large. Eventually the players will acquire Bags of Holding and the whole encumbrance issue is ignored. Fourth edition is particularly good about this and allows bags of holding to be very easily created at low levels.

Encumbrance is a kind of book-keeping thing that computers are actually very good at. It is interesting to look at how computer games have handled this. Games basically use the idea of 'slots' or 'weight' with the majority seeming to lean towards slots. Some games do away with carrying limitations altogether and characters can carry as much as they want without limit. When 'weight' is used it magnifies the importance of strength and penalizes weak characters in often unplanned ways. For example, a strong character can carry plenty of magic potions while a weak wizardly type can't. Another way to model encumbrance was slots. Each item could take one or more slots. When items took multiple slots the effort of encumbrance also became one of moving items around to maximize space.

Inventory management is typically not one of the more enjoyable aspects of the game. So should you play with encumbrance at all? Should you make it so that your players quickly obtain magic items that nullify the issue of encumbrance? Or should you track every pound so that when a character loses strength from some effect then are also hindered in terms of movement?

The reason I was thinking about encumbrance is because it is can be greatly improved by a computer progam managing it. Otherwise it is too much a pain in the ass. Often what happens is that players don't even keep track of who is holding what. When character X is swept away by a river they all assume that he wasn't carrying any treasure at all. When Y is hit by a Ray of Enfeeblement you either spend a few minutes figureing out what they are actually carrying and how much it ways or you just skip it due to the hassle. Another hassle is figuring out how much stuff weighs. If you figure encumbrance precisely you have to put a weight to every objet the characters might pick up. How much does a silver crown weigh? How much does a platinum sceptre weigh?

But it is worth tracking at all? Or should you just give the players unlimited carrying capacity either by just ruling it or by letting them have bags of holding? What does encumbrance add?

One thing is that it limits what they carry. I have noticed that many players carry around two sets of armor. One as a set they can sleep in, their 'pajamas'. Also players will often gather the weapons of fallen foes. They just defeated 20 well-armed warriors and they will want to collect and sell their gear. Using encumbrance helps to limit this craziness. Encumbrance also comes into play with strength draining effects. If you can produce numbers easily it is cool to say that a character becomes encumbered, but can avoid a penalty by tossing away his bag of treasure. More precise encumbrance tracking also leads to knowing who carries what. Often in combat the players will suddenly want to pull outsome potion or scroll, but may not have divided stuff up. Or if a player if forced to abandon equipment you need to know what he had and what the others had. Encumbrance can also be a plot point. I remember in one adventure my party discovered a vast treasure trove in a hidden valley. It was so vast that we couldn't carry it away. We ended spending a great deal of it on teleports to get it all out. We ending up leaving the copper and silver since it just wasn't worth it.

Some day I would like to whip up some javascript to handle encumbrance easily. If I had this I would still want items like bags of holding in my game, but I would set it up so that item retrieval from such a bag was time consuming. That way the character could make choices about what was going to be available in battle without having to worry about total encumbrance so much. Without this though, I don't see too many problems with the 4th edition answer to encumbrance, easy to obtain bags of holding that let you draw out anything easily.

Death

Fierce battles are a standard part of RPGs. These battles are often difficult in order to make the game fun and challenging. In order to add the element of danger and risk it is possible for the characters to lose, and typically losing means death.

In 3.5 D&D, you can die from hit point damage or from "instant death" effects that typically involve a saving throw. Death from hit point damage occurs when you are at -10 hit points. At low levels this means that death is rare because most hit will not drop you over 10 hit points. Also large area of effect attacks are rare and will not tend to finish off the dead. But as you reach mid levels, area of effect attacks and hits that do over 10 points of damage are common and death from hit point damage becomes common. Once dead you can be brought back by a 9th level cleric via Raise Dead. It costs a lot of money and the raised character loses a level. It is a fairly significant penalty. Eventually at 17th level a cleric can use True Ressurection that brings a character back without level loss, although the money cost is still significant. One of the basic game effects is that as characters become more powerful they also tend to die more. At low levels death is a serious thing, while at high levels it becomes less serious, but much more common since damages go up and often monsters have to kill a character in order to take them out of the battle since healing can easily bring back fallen but non-dead characters.

In Paizo's 3.75 attempts are made to make dying a little more difficult as well as making the penalty for death less severe. Instead of -10, a character dies at -10 or negative their constitution, whichever is less. This makes it a little harder to die, but not by a huge amount. The more substantial change is the essential removal of the death penalty. Instead of losing a level the character gains negative levels. These negative levels can be then removed by further spells. The effect is that while casting the spells to bring someone backs get slightly harder and more expensive the huge penalty for dying is gone.

In 4.0, they make dying much harder to do and much easier to come back from. Instead of dying at -10 or negative your constitution you die at negative half your hit points. But this is balanced out by the fact the healing, while easier to get in 4.0, is much more limited. In 3.5 a cleric can hit a dying character with a Heal spell and bring them to full. In 4.0 healing is based on percentages and most heals heal you a straight 25% of your health. Also while a high level 3.5 healer can pump out very large amounts of healing, in 4.0 there are more limits on the number of heals you use during an encounter and a total cap of how much healing a character can receive. In 4.0 it is possible to be out of the combat without being dead as compared to 3.5 where those brought to negatives are extremely easy to bring up with a little bit of healing. Another key aspect of 4.0 is that save or die effects are largely removed. Effects like this still exist, but are replaced with the effects that allow multiple saving throws. For example, a medusa's gaze only has a 12.5% chance to turn you to stone even if you do the equivalent of failing your 3.5 save. And you also get 3 rounds to try and save yourself from this gradual effect. Being brought back from the dead is also fairly easy in 4.0. Any character can get the spell to raise the dead, although some get it more easily than others, and you do not need a cleric. It costs money, but there is no experience loss.

Hero System does not really deal with death. You can die, but getting knocked out is much more likely. But Hero is much more of a toolkit than a fully balanced game and whether a character is allowed to create a healing power or even a raising power can drastically effect how the game plays out.

In MMORPGs, death is common. It is typically easy to die and any penalty is very minor. In World of Warcraft, hitting 0 health means death. No negative buffer, such a buffer would be meaningless given the prevalance of healing in that game. Death involves having to run back and taking some damagae to your equipment. However, the game is designed so that for most of the interesting encounters death takes you out of the battle.

In fiction, death is rare. Because there is no real risk like in a game, the heroes don't tend to die. In the few cases they do die and come back, it is never an easy or simple process and typically the story revolves around it.

So what is the purpose of death in a RPG? Well, it is a tactical element. It is a way to remove a character from battle. It is also a penalty for losing. Your character's life is what you risk when you go and adventure. It can also be a story element. In general I think death has one major positive effect in the game and one major negative effect. The positive effect is removal from combat. Characters being taken out of combat makes combat more dangerous and more interesting. It gives the sense that you are losing or that the battle is close. The negative effect is mainly a story effect. If death is essentially a fine you have to pay it loses meaning. It also has effects on the game world. It being brought back from the dead is just a matter of cash won't the rich constantly be bringing themselves back? Murder mysteries and assassinations need special interventions to make them interesting or else they will be solved with a simple spell. In terms of modeling fiction easy resurrection is a total failure.

So how should death be handled? Im my opinion, it should possible to be taken out of combat, but it should be very difficult to actually die. Resurrection should not be something easy or trivial. Fourth edition D&D does this pretty well. It allows for a condition that is out of combat but not dead. In 3.5 and 3.75 this condition is there for low levels, but quickly disappears as injuries drop you to death more easily and heal spells can easily pull you out of this condition. In these editions you have to be killed in order to really take you out of combat. You reach a situation where as DM you are forced to make monsters attack unconscious characters because those characters can so easily be brought back up with healing. Both 3.75 and 4.0 both made dying harder and resurrection easier. But in my mind you really only need to do one of these things. If dying is rare, ressurection can be rare also, or if resurrection is easy then dying can happen all the time. I favor the first case.

To fix the issue of frequent death one possible solution is to extend the out of combat but not dead state. One way is to extend the range you can have negative hit points like what 3.75 did. But with save or die effects and large heals this is only a minor patch. Another possibility is to introduce a kind of near death condition. Once a character has lost all their hit points or been hit by a save or die spell they could enter a near death state. Maybe in this state healing has much less effect and can really only prevent death. Or maybe once you are given positive hit points you must still spend a certain number of rounds stunned or nauseous before you can fully act again. If it required 3 rounds of no actions and 3 rounds of only a move action before a character could participate in combat again, you would have the aspect of a character being taken out of battle without them actually being killed. This mechanic could then be toyed with by other mechanics. You could have spells that specifically removed this near death condition. You could have feats that allowed you to recover from it quicker or maybe allowed you to survive in it longer than normal.

Once dying becomes hard, you can make resurrection more difficult and more of a story element. You could require resurrection to include a trip into the underworld to bring back the dead. Perhaps the characters must fight an underworld guardian in order to free their friends soul. Very Greek mythology. Or maybe to bring a soul back you must perform some sacrifice, perhaps a life given willingly or some pledge to complete a quest. A kind of holy justice motif. Or you could have something more horror movie-ish. When you bring back the dead you rip a hole between the world of the living and dead and resurrection will also spawn undead, perhaps powerful undead. As such resurrection would normally be completely forbidden and not something you could just pick up at your local church.

ALTERNATE RULES FOR 3.5 and 3.75
When you are at negative hit points you are unconscious and you lose 1 per round until you are at negative half your total hit points. If you are healed magically, someone with the Heal skill spends a full round and makes a check, or if anyone spends 3 full rounds tending you you stop losing hit points. If you reach negative half your total hit points, you get a single fort save (DC ??). If you fail you are dead. If you make the save you are alive but comatose. Any damage will instantly kill you.

Once you go below 0 hit points you gain the condition Half Dead. If your hit points are made positive you spend 3 rounds stunned and 3 rounds nauseous. Only spells and effects that specifically remove Half Dead will shorten the duration of this stunning and nausea. Once you hit negative half your hit points, if you make your save you are Near Death. Near Death is like Half Dead, but requires 10 rounds of stunned and 10 rounds of nausea. If a character is Half Dead or Near Death with positive hit points and they go negative and then positive again they total rounds of stunned of nauseous get reset, but never reduced.

All "save or die" abilities are changed so that they have a damage with them. A successful save indicates that you take the damage. A failed save indicates that you are reduced to 0 hit points regardless of your total and then immediately take the damage. All "save or death-like-effect" abilities like being turned to stone, have an intermediate effect. The intermediate effect takes affect after the first failed save. The character has one round suffering the intermediate effect and then they get to make another save. If they fail again they take the full effect.

All spell effects that bring characters back from the dead no longer cause level loss, but act as a summoning spell four levels higher that either summons undead or other-worldly guardians that as hostile to the caster. Or the caster and perhaps some other are effected by a Quest/Geas spell as determined by the DM. Raised characters start in a Near Death state.