alternate armor

I have been considering the idea of using an alternate system for armor in D&D-like games. Instead of increasing the character's Armor Class, the armor would reduce the die type of an incoming attack. Depending on the dice chain that a GM uses this could be marginally deadly or make damage virtually nonexistant. This means combat would also be bloodier as everybody would be getting hit more often, but warriors and clerics would take less damage respectively since they are typically more armored than rogues and wizards.

Leather -1d
Chain -2d
Plate -3d
Shield -1

The way those are read is Leather reduces incoming damage by one die type, Chain armor reduces damage by two die types, and Plate armor reduces damage by three die types. A Shield would reduce damage only by -1 point. Reducing a d4 would simply add a -2 to the total damage inflicted and damage could never be reduced lower than 1 point, so a successful strike will always deal at least 1 damage.

This is something I've toyed with because I've always wanted to create a system where every PC starts with the same amount of Hit Points (20) and very little variation exists between classes. Monsters would also have a similar amount of Hit Points, but could get increases due to size or supernatural traits.

1d20 vs 2d6

My group has been playing Apocalypse World for the last few weeks and the players' reactions to the mechanics has revealed a stark discrimination towards the dice. When we were playing Dungeon Crawl Classics I would hear complaints that having a 50% chance of success was "too random" and sometimes players wouldn't even take action if they knew they needed to roll a 14 or higher, saying the chance of success was too slim (35%). Yet here we are playing Apocalypse World where a 7 or better is a marginal success (41% chance) with negative repercussions, and a 10 or better is a success (17% chance) that still comes with a negative cost (regardless of the action rolled), and there have been no complaints about the slim chances, "randomness" of the dice results, or even the uniform unfairness of the rolls.

I roll my eyes every time they excitedly pick up the dice.

As for Apocalypse World itself, there are a few minor things I don't like about the rules but there are many things I love about it. The concept and use of the History stat, character progression, simplified combat resolution, and even the consistent 7+/10+ success results needed for every dice roll, are all pretty sweet.

I just received my print copy of Carcosa this week, and it is a fucking gorgeous book!


Now that I'm able to flip through it and leisurely take it in, I think it's negative and "controversial" reputation is undeserved. It's a pretty sick and twisted supplement, it also has a few minor things I don't like, but overall I love the artwork, the descriptions of monsters, the weird psionics system, and the randomized damage system. It's all very weird and strange but exotically beautiful.

wizards of the third age

Idelfyn was a wizard, an architect, and a student of the dark lord Saprodei. He is perhaps best known for having built a series of towers across the world which were all destroyed simultaneously at the time of his death.

Idelfyn's parents were members of the Cult of the Dweller, though the exact time and place of his birth is not known. Either he was sold as a slave to Saprodei or left the cult of his own free will, but for a hundred years Idelfyn trained and served the dark lord Saprodei. He is said to have had a hand in the dark lord's destruction, though his actual role is unknown.

He constructed a series of seven towers which were almost certainly used as safe places to teleport, he was often seen entering one tower on the same day he would exit from another. He is credited with helping to stabilize the nation of Zenev after the dark lord's destruction. It is well known that he employed otherworldly servants made of living rock and constructed metal golems, both of which could prevent unwanted intruders from entering any of his towers.

After two centuries, all of Idelfyn's towers were simultaneously destroyed by a magical rift that gouged each tower out from the landscape. It is assumed a teleportation accident of some kind destroyed the towers and that Idelfyn died in the incident. His sudden absence from the politics of Zenev left a power vacuum and it is considered the primary reason for Zenev's decline into barbarism.

brainstorming

Characters have four ability scores, with 7 points to distribute amongst them
Power +0 : strength, stamina
Quick +0 : reflexes, agility, speed
Moxie +0 : willpower, personality, grit
Valor +0 : bravery, fortitude, luck

Originally I was thinking that these abilities would simply play off the standard ideas of having an attack roll, an armor class, and hit points.
Power would add to a base Attack of +0
Valor would add to a starting pool of 10 Hit Points
Armor Class would be on an ascending scale, starting at 10 and going up with Quick

I tried to break the classic four classes down into two traits and if every player would be allowed to select two traits, they could mix and match class characteristics. I had a hard time coming up with something simplistic, so I just created a list of categories for modifications to Attack and HP.

CHAMPION = add Valor to Attack
PUGILIST = add Power to HP
HOOLIGAN = add Quick to HP
RAKE = add Quick to Attack
APOSTLE = add Moxie to Attack
HEALER = healing ability (roll using Moxie)
MAGUS = add Moxie to HP
ENCHANTER = magic (magic uses HP to cast)

As I examined the math of these traits I realized that maxing out Quick and picking the Hooligan and Rake traits would make an uber-character. There was no reason to create any other combination unless you wanted to heal or cast magic. I started to revise how these secondary abilities would work.

Instead of having a base starting score for Armor Class and Hit Points, I devised a calculation that would force players to truly examine where they would be putting their points. I wanted to force a "pure" Wizard concept character to put points into other abilities, instead of just maxing out Moxie, and I wanted a "pure" Fighter concept character to be forced to examine Moxie's role in their secondary stats.

base Attack score would be a total of Power and Valor together
Armor Class would be the total of Quick and Moxie added together and doubled
Hit Points would be the total of Valor and Moxie added together and doubled

With these numbers I would have to change how points were distributed, and I couldn't allow for an ability score of +0 otherwise somebody might accidentally start with a 0 HP character. All characters would start with +1 in each ability score and then get 7 points to distribute on top of that.

The real kicker to all of this is that I wanted my math to work out with rolls being made using 2d10 added together instead of the traditional 1d20. Partially this was because I wanted a simplification of the target numbers for rolls, and partially it was because I wanted the target number to be rolled to never exceed 20.
Target Numbers would have to: 10, easy; 15, difficult; 20, impossible

The last thing I came up with were the spells for Wizards, which I always intended would cost Hit Points to cast and some spells would require Moxie rolls to succeed.
Destroy Chaos: 1 HP, roll Moxie vs TN 10, destroys any Chaos creature with less HP than the Wizard
Disarm Trap: 1 HP, no roll
Light: 1 HP, no roll, +1 HP permanent
Magic Missile: 1 HP, no roll, hits one target, 3 damage
Fireball: 2 HP, no roll, hits one target, 1d10 damage
Necrosis: 3 HP, roll Moxie vs target's AC, reduces Attack and Quick to +0 (re-calculate AC = cut in half)
Teleport: 4 HP, roll Moxie vs TN 10, +1 HP no roll
Death Bolt: 5 HP, roll Moxie vs target's AC, kills target

I wanted to simplify the Cleric's ability to heal as well. I didn't want any roll to be involved but I wanted a cumulative cost for the use of a multi-purpose power. This is what I settled on...
Healing: heal 4 HP, cure poison, or prevent death (if body not destroyed)
Cleric must touch target of the healing, each use lowers all of the Healer's ability scores by -1 (including Armor Class and Attack), all lost points recovered after rest

Here are examples of characters that I wrote up in the way I would want to play each class...
Power +1 , "zero level"
Quick +1 , Attack +2
Moxie +1 , AC 4
Valor +1 , HP 4

Power +2 , planning on being a WARRIOR
Quick +2 , Attack +7
Moxie +2 , AC 14
Valor +5 , HP 14

Power +1 , planning on being a ROGUE
Quick +6 , Attack +2
Moxie +3 , AC 14
Valor +1 , HP 8

Power +2 , planning on being a CLERIC
Quick +2 , Attack +5
Moxie +4 , AC 10
Valor +3 , HP 14

Power +1 , planning on being a WIZARD
Quick +2 , Attack +2
Moxie +7 , AC 6
Valor +1 , HP 16

Looking at how the numbers break down, the only thing left would be to design the classes (instead of picking two traits which could be min-maxed)
WARRIOR = add Power to HP, add Valor to HP
ROGUE = add Quick to HP, add Moxie to AC
CLERIC = add Valor to Attack, healing (uses Moxie and Valor)
WIZARD = add Quick to HP, magic (uses Moxie and HP)

With these additions the characters change into
Power +2 , WARRIOR
Quick +2 , Attack +7
Moxie +2 , AC 14
Valor +5 , HP 21

Power +1 , ROGUE
Quick +6 , Attack +2
Moxie +3 , AC 17
Valor +1 , HP 14

Power +2 , CLERIC
Quick +2 , Attack +8
Moxie +4 , AC 10
Valor +3 , HP 14

Power +1 , WIZARD
Quick +2 , Attack +2
Moxie +7 , AC 6
Valor +1 , HP 18

The really glaring things to me are with the Warrior, he does not have much of an advantage outside of the boost to Hit Points and I intended Power to be an important ability but the math forces Valor to become prominent. Others might notice that Wizards have lots of Hit Points, but that's because their spells require HP to use.

A quick breakdown of the mathematics
Attack = Power + Valor
AC = Quick x2 + Valor x2
HP = Moxie x2 + Valor x2

These are just ideas at the moment, but this is where my ideas have been trailing off to.

Keeping Time

"The 1 minute melee round assumes much activity - rushes, retreats, feints, parries, checks, and so on. Once during this period each combatant has the opportunity to get a real blow in. Usually this is indicated by initiative, but sometimes other circumstances will prevail." - Player's Handbook, page 105

In the 1st edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules, a round lasted for 1 minute. The explanation above encapsulates many of the rule-making decisions within that show how abstractly the concepts were being used. In actual play, I've never known a gamemaster to use this literal explanation for what is occurring in the round. The 1 minute round was meant to be broken down into 10 six-second segments. Spell-casting during combat was meant to endanger wizards as much as it was to spoil their magic. Consider the following statement:

"Spell-casters will always insist that they are able to use their powers during combat melee. The DM must adjudicate the success of such use. Consider this: The somatic (movement) portions of a spell must be begun and completed without interruption in a clean, smooth motion. The spell as a whole must be continuous and uninterrupted from beginning to end. Once interrupted, for any reason whatsoever, the spell is spoiled and lost (as if used). Spells cannot be cast while violently moving - such as running, dodging a blow, or even walking normally. They are interrupted by a successful hit - be it blow, missile, or appropriate spell (not saved against or saveable against)." - Dungeon Master's Guide, page 65

Such a rule today would be considered harsh and inviolate of the inherent "fun" of playing a wizard. I suspect this rule being contested by players is what led to the Concentration skill in later editions.

Speed factors look to be an important part of 1st edition, where strange advantages present themselves:

"When weapon speed factor is the determinant of which opponent strikes first in a melee round, there is a chance that one opponent will be entitled to multiple attacks. Compare the score of the lower-factored weapon with that of the higher. If the difference is at least twice the factor of the lower, or 5 or more factors in any case, the opponent with the lower factored weapon is entitled to 2 attacks before the opponent with the higher weapon factor is entitled to any attack whatsoever. If the difference is 10 or greater, the opponent with the lower-factored weapon is entitled to 2 attacks before the opponent is allowed to attack, and 1 further attack at the same time the opponent with the higher-speed-factored weapon finally is allowed to attack." - Dungeon Master's Guide, page 66

This implies that a thief using a dagger (speed factor 2) will always get to attack twice against a fighter with any kind of sword (speed factor 5 or more). Is it any surprise that most groups of players never paid attention to speed factors? I remember using speed factors with only one GM (as a negative modifier to initiative), but then he also didn't use the official explanation of 1 round equaling 1 minute of time.

Time keeping isn't essential for determining combat. You don't really need to know how long it takes to wield a battleaxe against a dagger-wielding thief or a pseudopod-swinging otyugh. Time keeping becomes a huge factor once you add magic though, many spells require a full round to cast or are pared down to segments. Just flipping open to a random page in the Player's Handbook one third of the spells require 1 round, another third of the spells take 5 or 6 segments, and the final third require a full turn to cast. And there's the rub!
1 segment = 6 seconds
10 segments = 1 round = 1 minute
10 rounds = 10 minutes = 1 turn

Just as many of the Old School Renaissance rules systems use a 10 second combat round as the ones that use the classic 1 minute round, and almost all of the OSR games keep the use of 10 minute turns. Though most simply instruct the players to track time outside of combat with regular minutes and hours.

Third edition D&D did away with this complexity entirely! A round represented 6 seconds of time, and the 10 minute turn was abolished. Initiative was now much more abstract and rolled with a d20 instead of rigidly timed with the round segments by rolling a d10. Speed factors for weapons disappeared. Casting times for spells were no longer broken up into a strange calculation of time and were simply described as "1 action" or in the cases of complex and powerful magics an actual time of "1 minute" "30 minutes" or "1 hour" was listed.

I appreciate the simplicity.

magic blades for DCC RPG

Because Dungeon Crawl Classics has a design philosophy that every magic item be unique, and because the creation of a random magic weapon is so extensive, I've decided that it would be useful for me to have some pre-generated magic weapons to be able to litter in mid- to high-level adventures later on.


Inghem
Inghem was a long sword ensorceled by a lazy wizard in the city of Wallengard, where the captain of the watch paid handsomely for possession of the sword. His son inherited the sword and believing that Inghem's potential as a survival tool was priceless. He ventured out to lands unknown, never to be heard from again.
+1 to hit, damage 1d8+1
Chaotic, Int 6, no communication
wielder and all allies within 30' gain +2 to hit and damage vs unicorns
Detect Water, 70' at will

Wit
Wit was once used by a famous assassin by the name of Zag. Zag used the dagger to backstab, garrote, and slay wizards from one end of the world to the other. He would keep the wealth from these killings but destroy the magic items. Nobody knows why he set out on this personal quest against magic-users, but everybody knows he eventually met his end at the hands of the Watery Graves, a band of mercenaries renowned for drowning their targets who had been hired by a secretive (and still unknown) wizard.
+2 to hit, +1 critical range vs wizards, damage 1d4
Neutral, Int 11, empathy, become one with nature
Detect Magic 2/day (21 effect)
Detect Corruption, 1000' at will
Acid Resistance, ignore 3 points of damage, +1 to saves vs acidic attacks

Filbey
In the 7th century of the Arkadan Empire's supremacy, a priest of Gorhan wielded Filbey against the third Army of Chaos Beasts. He hunted their lich-dragon general into the Kerbennian Mountains and was said to have used his last breath to slay the un-dead Chaos dragon. Where the sword ended up after that final battle is anyone's guess...
+2 to hit, +1 critical range vs undead, damage 1d8+2/+6 vs. Orcs
Lawful, Int 11, empathy, wants to slay Chaos and undead
Locate Object 2/day (26 effect)
Detect Secret Doors within 10' at will
Whirlwind Strike: Instead of making his normal attack, the wielder can make two attacks in a single round, but rolls 1d10 for each attack instead of his usual action die. He applies his normal attack bonus. Critical hits are not possible when attacking in this manner.

the Razor of Argis
This dagger that was crafted by the hands of a Lord of Chaos whose name has been forgotten for thousands of years, but whose influence still extends under the watchful eye of the Hidden Lord.
+4 to hit, Damage 1d4+4
Chaos, Int 18, speech and telepathy, punish interlopers and those who interfere with clearing the world for the invasion of the Lords of Chaos
+1 to hit & damage vs Humans
+1 to hit & damage & critical range vs dragons
+2 to hit & damage vs Clerics
+2 AC bonus vs Lawful while wielding Argis
Berserker Fury when facing Clerics; ego check or wielder gains +4 Strength and Stamina for 2d6 rounds, then is exhausted at -4 Strength and Stamina for 1d6 turns thereafter 1d6 then 1d6+10
Unreasoning Hatred: sword urges wielder to attack Lawful creatures at every opportunity (ego check)
Globe of Darkness obscures surroundings within 20’ at will
Armor-breaker: On any critical hit, the opponent’s armor is destroyed, in addition to other effects.
Weapon-breaker: On any critical hit, the opponent’s weapon is destroyed, in addition to other effects. If the creature has natural weapons, they are maimed (e.g., claws are broken, teeth are shattered, etc.).
Throwing Blade: Sword can be thrown up to 20’ to make a ranged attack. It always returns to its owner’s hand after a throw.
Un-dead Touch: The weapon scores critical hits as an Un-dead creature, rolling 1d30 on crit table U whenever a crit is scored.
Summon Troll: The sword is magically keyed to Trolls and the wielder can summon such a creature 2 times per day.
Eviscerator: When rolling damage, the wielder rolls an additional damage die every time he rolls a 4. For example, if the PC rolls a "4" for damage, he then rolls another 1d4 and adds that to the damage result. Continuing to roll an extra die with every "4" that is rolled.
Rift Ripper: A creature struck by this blade must make a Fort save vs DC 13 or is banished to a random plane of Chaos.


I rolled randomly for the first three, using the stats of a wizard getting increasingly stronger in level and skill, but the last one I starting with the highest possible characteristics and rolled randomly from there. I massaged the results for many of the Banes so there wasn't anything that seemed out of tune with the blade's purpose, and I replaced the Medusa's Touch power with Rift Ripper, but it works essentially the same.

DCC Optional Rules

After my players were on the short end of a total party kill I've decided to codify the optional rules I'm going to allow them to draw upon during gameplay.

Shields Shall Be Splintered: A character wielding a shield may elect to have the shield be destroyed in order to avoid being struck by a killing blow. Magical shields are knocked out of the character's hand and a full-round action must be spent to pick it up again.

Helmets Shall Be Dented: A character wearing a helmet may elect to have the helmet ruined in order to avoid suffering a critical hit. This reduces all damage done to 1 point. Magical helmets are knocked off a character's head and a full-round action must be spent picking it up and putting it back on.

Feel The Burn: I know I read this elsewhere but currently can't find the source. A character may take a permanent 1 point loss in Stamina to heal 1 hit dice worth of hit points. If the reduction in Stamina results in a penalty (or a loss of a bonus), the maximum hit point total of the character is affected.

Coup de Grace: As long as a creature has the discernible anatomy for a coup de grace, it may be performed on their defenseless body. Prone but active targets still require a roll to hit.

Perception is not a Skill: Perception rolls become a function of the relevant ability plus level added to the roll. (see Method 3 in the link)

Take Ten: If the character is not in combat (or a stressful environment) they may avoid rolling a die to accomplish a task and instead may "take ten" minutes to finish a task. The task is finished as if they rolled a '10' on their die. If they succeed they may continue on, if they fail than they must accept the result. This rule may be used to carefully cast a spell, climb a ledge, or examine their surroundings. (There is NO 'Take Twenty' rule.)

Universal OSR Monsters

As part of my assignment for the Secret Santicore this year, I compiled a list of the monsters that are described and given stats in four OSR game systems: Adventurer Conqueror King, Labyrinth Lord, Swords & Wizardry, and Dungeon Crawl Classics. The following list is a basic compilation of those monsters (excluding different types of dragons, giants, etc.):

Ant, Giant
Basilisk
Bat, Giant
Beetle, Giant
Bugbear
Centaur
Centipede, Giant
Chimera
Cockatrice
Dragon
Elemental
Gargoyle
Ghoul
Giant
Gnoll
Goblin
Griffon
Harpy
Hell Hound
Hobgoblin
Horse
Hydra
Kobold
Leech, Giant
Lizardman
Manticore
Minotaur
Ogre
Orc
Owlbear
Shadow
Skeleton
Troll
Wolf
Zombie

dungeon contest

The Secret DM is having a design a dungeon contest to celebrate E. Gary Gygax'es birthday. They're giving away a few books but the real prize will be to see your dungeon get published digitally.

Submit your dungeon entries to thesecretdm@gmail.com with the subject line "Gygax Contest"

I've got some work to do!

What the Gods want...

Generally I don't have any complaints about clerics themselves. I do, however, think that their role as a part of fantasy worlds' society is greatly undervalued. When you have somebody who can, as a beginner in his line of work, completely heal at least two to four commoners of injury every day then the meaning of risk and injury takes on new meanings. In a magical world clerics are essentially foolproof and risk-free doctors, or combat medics depending on the deity they worship, and a mundane understanding of medicine will never flourish or progress if society has a subset of people who can merely pray for injuries to be healed. This isn't even taking into account that at higher levels healing powers become astronomical in how much can be doled out, a high-level cleric could keep a single village alive all on their own, and two high-level clerics in the same village will have enough healing to spare that regardless of the village's worth it will begin to prosper and grow.

I'm not just picking on this discrepancy in D&D, many other game systems allow for healing on a massive scale and never show any effects upon society as a whole for these walking hospital clinics being the go-to people for injury, disease and poisoning. In most campaign worlds, clerics are servants of the deities so it might be rightly assumed that the gods themselves have reasons for not turning their clerics loose as all-purpose healers for their community. But this assumption is just that, an assumption. Nothing is ever explicitly stated about the gods object to this kind of behavior, and from the gods' point of view this might actually be the best thing for their priests to be doing since having agents who can touch people and instantly fix a broken bone or banish leprosy would make that deity quite popular.

I've heard an argument once that a deity wouldn't allow healing to be doled out to just anybody and that the cleric would probably only be able to perform these kinds of duties for people who specifically followed his own deity. But this argument fails because the deities of pantheons are usually described as working together to fight against a single evil god, or small group of evil gods. In a pantheon of deities that work together it simply doesn't make sense that they would withhold magic from followers of their compatriots. "If you Heal my follower today, I'll Wind Walk yours next week." In a more realistically selfish pantheon, like the ancient Greek gods, it could be justified since the old pagan gods were quite jealous, vengeful and arrogant.

Then you have to wonder about each individual deity's goals. Wouldn't they want their clerics healing as many people as possible because then they're potentially picking up new followers, and new clerics? It's a feedback loop. I could see a deity manifesting at a farmer's house when he gets a toothache and 'cure' him just so he grows more food and shares it freely with others all in the name of said deity. Instant worshippers! If others start seeing that the followers of this deity never go hungry and never suffer the aches and pains of living then it would be on a fast track to being the the most powerful and influential god around. Screw the adventuring heroes! Let them get eaten by dragons! If a deity needs to smite something to protect their followers it'll just show up and do it on their own!

All of this assumes that deities' want followers. If a deity has no need to be worshipped then a lot of this logic falls flat. Check out The Primal Order if you can find it, it's rules for role-playing deities.

Diamonds are a wizard's best friend

There are hundreds of wizards running around contemporary D&D settings and society still manages to exist in this pre-Renaissance middle ages limbo. A low-level wizard is essentially an engineer, police officer, scholar, or a myriad other number of equivalent professions and when society doesn't react to that magic being used in a utilitarian way then that civilization is mediocre and illogically stagnating.

In 1987, I created my first wizard character. Up until that point I had always played fighters or barbarians, so it was a complete change and in my young mind I felt like I was giving up the brawny, muscular Conan-like character I had always played for something that more closely resembled myself, a stick-thin geeky egghead who kept his nose in books. In play I ended up constantly fearing my character would get killed and so I always kept the most offensive spells prepared. When the character was capable of casting fireball it became my go-to spell for any combat situation much to the frequently aflame dismay of my party members.

Identify This!
I remember the moment around the table where I was confronted with using material components for spells, something that had always been handwaved aside before. We had recently plundered a dungeon and returned to the city with a bag filled with magic items that we didn't know what they did yet. It was my job to cast the Identify spell on each of the items and determine their properties before we could properly divide the loot, and I remember every player had to pool their gold pieces in order to buy the material components for the Identify spells that needed to be cast. You see, every time you cast an Identify spell it consumes a pearl worth 100 gold pieces. I remember we needed eight of these pearls and so we needed 800 gold pieces, but the total take in gold pieces from the dungeon we had just journeyed back from was about half of that total.

It then occurred to me that the place where we would buy these pearls had more total wealth in his store in gemstones than the entire dungeon we had just plundered had in gold pieces. I made the suggestion "Why don't we just break in to the jeweler's and steal the diamonds we need?" and I distinctly remember it wasn't the DM who tried to dissuade us from this action, but the players themselves started describing no-win scenarios for trying to burgle a small town's storefront. These were players who had just killed dozens of lizardmen and drow in a protracted three-day battle through their lair. They were willing to risk their necks going into an underground lair filled with armored and spellcasting "monsters" but somehow breaking into a jewelry store at midnight became an impossibility. Eventually a lengthy and drawn out debate about alignment proceeded, which seemed to be routine in those days, but eventually out of exasperation the thief in our party took me aside to say "I'll try to break in later tonight when everybody else is asleep."

I don't really remember how all of that resolved, but I do remember that eventually I got the pearls to cast the Identify spells and we generally ended up with eight magic items that most of us couldn't use or didn't really want. I kept thinking about those eight 100 gp pearls and how they were now 'gone forever' and were worth more in my mind than what we got out of the entire adventure, dungeon treasure, magical items and all. I didn't know it at the time, but this was the seed of doubt that started my whole point of view that D&D worlds have no internal consistency.

Spare a light?
Consider the Continual Flame spell, the 3rd edition's answer to Continual Light. In previous editions there was no material component and with a permanent duration that meant any wizard capable of casting one 2nd-level spell per day could become the equivalent of the neighborhood electrician. In 3rd edition they decided to balance out this permanent spell by making it cost 50 gold pieces worth of ruby dust to cast. Rubies, I think, would become very VERY rare. So much so that the cost of the ruby dust would skyrocket, and thus how much dust do you actually use for the spell? 50 gp worth? The amount used by wizards would then become arbitrarily smaller and smaller, and the amount of ruby used up would become less and less, meaning that eventually there would be all of these permanently lit lights on the market and no rubies.

According to the way things are priced in the Player's Handbook, 50 gold pieces should not be that hard to come by. Most commoners won't be hiring their local wizard to make a permanent torch, but anybody with the money to do so would get one. This is the kind of impact I was talking about before. When magic exists in the world, people WILL use it and that usage should have both a cultural and social effect.

Anybody who was alive in the 1990s remembers pagers. How many people got pagers just because it was "the thing" people were doing? Half the kids in my high school had pagers, and regardless of how often they were actually used the price of pagers went down and pagers became more accessible, until cell phones started becoming "the thing" to have. And now it's iPhones and Androids and Blackberries. I own a cheap $15 pay as you go phone, but most of my friends have iPhones - I couldn't tell you with any certainty how many of them download apps or use it solely for calling people, but it's new tech and I have to think in a world where magic exists that if the magic is not pushing the tech to improve then the magic itself is the tech that is becoming more common.

Reality! Who needs it?
In the past I've had people address the idea that the tabletop game is not meant to be a completely realistic setting, and that nobody plays RPGs for realism. I agree. But if your suspension of disbelief isn't engaged then the absurdity of the setting will override whatever fun you think you're having. You'll look back on something and think "that didn't make any sense" and be bothered by it. Or maybe you won't. Maybe your apathy can trump your sense of logic. For myself, I expect reactions to follow action. If I kill the leader of a thieves' guild, I expect to see a power vacuum with subordinates fighting over the newly vacant position. That's not a quibble about the rules, that's an expectation of setting.

The problem with D&D is that it has always tied its rules in to the setting in order to create "balance" - and balance is an illusion that has never truly been there. Besides, I suspect if you ask most players what they want out of a tabletop RPG you're not going to hear either of the words "balance" or "realism" - but you will hear "a good GM" and good GMs take balance and realism into account when they run their games.

Sorry for the digression, now back to the local gem market!

With this ring, I thee ensorcel.
According to every edition of AD&D Identify is a 1st-level wizard spell, most wizards can start with it, and it costs a 100 gold piece pearl to cast it once. You are literally destroying a gem worth 100 gold pieces every time you cast the spell. The thought that occurred to me back then was "If I'm destroying pearls to cast this spell, what happens when the pearls run out?" And as a player I was always deeply resentful of the arbitrary price and limitations of the Identify spell. I once asked a GM if I could start researching a higher-level version of Identify that wouldn't require a 100 gp pearl as a component and he nearly turned white at the prospect that players might be able to just cast Identify without some sort of monetary limitation placed upon them. Again, game balance became an issue and so I dropped the idea but I never stopped thinking about it.

I remember when I could cast the Stoneskin spell I had a similar quandary. Stoneskin costs 250 gp worth of diamond to cast, and if you're a wizard you generally cast it every day. Without going into the numbers, a 250 gold piece diamond is about what you'd expect two very nice engagement ring diamonds to be like, small in size and a valuable carat.

But, and here's the really sticky flaw in all of this, diamonds are not actually that rare and in the real world their value has been artificially inflated due to a monopoly. De Beers is a company who in the past controlled over 90% of the diamond trade on Earth (presently you could say their control has dropped to about 60 to 75%), and their chairman Nicky Oppenheimer said it best: "diamonds are intrinsically worthless, except for the deep psychological need they fill." In the span of forty years diamonds had their prices inflated by almost 1000% and a $20 million industry became a $2 billion industry, and this was all before the massive inflation of the 1970s.

Thus, the D&D equivalent of a 250 gp diamond is really a contemporary view of what the worth of a diamond is. Are diamonds really that rare in D&D? Or is there a similar kind of inflated market price in D&D? This second question is how I explained away the massive cost of using diamonds and pearls for the Stoneskin and Identify spells, not only for the sake of my own internal logic as a player but when I started GMing I hand-waved the use of gemstones for spellcasting in a similar manner.

I would sometimes wonder about the gem trade within the setting of Dragonlance (the first campaign I played in) but then also began to consider it for Forgotten Realms (the first campaign world I GMed). Where were the diamonds coming from? And why hadn't they run out after thousands of years of wizards casting spells and adventuring and going to war over the eastern passage? And do the prices of diamonds go up as more and more wizards cast Stoneskin spells over the years? Is 250 gp worth of diamond related to weight or carat? And does the spell, over time, need less diamond as the inherent value of diamonds start to increase? And what of pearls, are there oyster farms where pearls are being produced solely for wizards' Identify spells? How does the market determine what costs 100 gp, and is the spell responsive to the value of the pearl or are the pearls only harvested and priced once they're the right size? Do these gems need to be cut and polished gemstones? Perhaps a shiny rock would suffice if, after laborious cutting and polishing, it would equal the required GP amount? Does it have to be finished as some means of keeping the economy going? If so, the gemcutter in the nearest city must keep fairly busy.

These are questions that I was asking as a teenager!

The whole economy is probably always going to be weird due to how some folks can just pop over to the Elemental Plane of Earth and snag a few of the literally infinite number of gemstones there (the Plane Shift spell doesn't require a material component). You might need literal tons of gems just to cast one spell, especially if the market has been flooded after a week of wizards plane shifting to gather diamonds. Which again makes me think "Where is the worth and value of the gemstone determined? Does the spell just know how much the diamonds and pearls are worth?"

There are so many more spells that require 1000 and 2500 gold piece gemstones. Some of which are for high-level spells that last for a few rounds (or 1 round per level of the caster). The money sink is just ridiculous, especially when I think back and remember that I never had gold pieces in the thousands.

I eventually graduated to just ignoring material components most of the time because they are arbitrary and in most cases ridiculous. The concept of material components is a throwback to the idea that wizards and witches would use mysterious ingredients in their incantations over the creation of potions and elixirs that I think somehow also got applied to spellcasting when the 1st edition rules were penned. Balance doesn't really enter into the equation because when the material components become extravagantly wealthy items that need to be procured then the GM suddenly has to make sure the PCs are getting the resources they need to use the spells they have, and if the GM never gives the PCs the ability or opportunity to acquire them than that's worse than railroading. Personally, unless it's a fairly dramatic spell (like something that will destroy a whole town or permanently enchant a sword), I just don't care about imposing those kinds of additional restrictions onto my players.

The cracks in the foundation (long)

In the early 1990s I was purchasing Dark Sun books and there was this itch in my brain that some things in AD&D simply didn't make any sense, and I was always trying to force a level of realism onto my games which they could never quite muster or live up to. Something just seemed off about the setting, EVERY setting. I think back on it now and the cause of my doubts was actually rooted in the apparent design fr the game itself.

When I eventually stopped playing AD&D and started playing other games, like Deadlands or GURPS, it wasn't because of the rules but was just my brain branching out and exploring new worlds. As I look back upon my GMing experiences as a young adult, and the games I picked up to play when I abandoned GMing, I am struck not by how dissimilar the rules or the conventions of the settings were, but of how different the GMs handled these worlds when trying to craft living, breathing spaces for their players to interact with.

In short, the settings for AD&D were static. They never truly changed and nothing really ever progressed. Even in the supplements and sourcebooks of the 1990s there is this concept that no matter what the players do the countryside remains relatively unchanged, the kingdoms do not fall or expand or shift policy, and there are always evil minions of oppositional gods moving in to the last dungeon that was cleared out or the last territory that was freed from tyranny. You don't have to look very far to see these signs of nothing ever changing.

1) Keep on the Borderlands was a signature adventure module that was released with the basic D&D boxed set of rules in the 1980s. In 1999 a sequel was produced, which showed little changes to the keep after twenty years and largely put the keep in greater disrepair while simultaneously just redistributing enemies among the local cave system to give players familiar with the original module some new surprises.

2) As first described for the Forgotten Realms, Elminster was a powerful wizard who lived in the countryside and could be hired as a sage. There were hints that he was a major player in the regional fighting that went on between the Red Wizards of Thay, Cormyr, Shadowdale, the lords of Waterdeep, etc. He was sometimes described as the magical equivalent of Leonardo da Vinci, yet he never invented anything or actually helped anybody in any meaningful way. Before the first novel had been written about him he had already been imparted outrageously high-level powers and trumps that would easily defeat any player who got it into his head to kill him off. The extant of his powers seems to reach godlike levels despite the fact that he isn't actually a god, and even though his alignment is officially listed as "chaotic good" he doesn't really do many things that could be considered either "chaotic" or "good" - he's actually very "neutral" since he's been in Toril for over 1000 years and yet he hasn't bothered using any of his vast magical powers to build sewing machines or distribute soap, either of which might be considered "good" for a land perpetually stuck in the middle ages.

3) The ultimate status quo of evil in D&D never pushes any boundaries, the bad guys are always repopulating at the same speed and always have the same goals. The ultimate slap in the face to consistency was the Blood War of the Planescape setting, in order to justify that the hordes of evil didn't overrun the planes of existence a protracted civil war between The Abyss and The Nine Hells was devised in order to keep evil fighting one another, because in a very simplified cartoonish world "evil always turns in on itself."

Let's forget these examples, which are only the first three that spring to my mind, and focus on a generic setting. No campaign, no sourcebooks with special rules, just a blank map, a rulebook and a GM trying to create a world. The rules, in all of their iterations, have had classes of enormously powerful magnitude for the level of technology that the world should exist in.

Just think about the potential of a 1st-level cleric. I'm assuming a completely average cleric with no extra special abilities beyond casting spells and turning undead. In almost every edition of the rules a 1st-level cleric can cast 'Cure Light Wounds' a minimum of three times every day. Most commoners are 0-level or 1st-level (depending on the edition) and rarely have more than 8 hit points, which means that a single 1st-level cleric is a walking hospital who is able to potentially save three lives every day. EVERY DAY! Yet in almost every D&D campaign there are always sick, wounded, dying people. From a mechanical standpoint, even low-level clerics are incredibly valuable people to have around. In 3rd edition D&D this gets even more ridiculous with feats that improve spells and give access to more spells.

This is just the average world of D&D.

Your doctor has powers granted to him by his deity, goblins occasionally try to raid your town, and you trade in gold. So imagine walking in to the doctor's office because you have a stomach flu only to be told he's off exploring a cave to the north because he wants to kill some goblins and find some gold. You would be utterly pissed off at his stupidity. You would look at his secretary and say "But I have gold pieces right here, and he only needs to use one-third of his powers for the day!" and his secretary says "But he wants to have more powers, that's why he's off killing goblins." You would think "Why? Hes already making money by being a doctor!" A 1st-level cleric who leaves his village to go off adventuring would be vilified for abandoning his neighbors.

Let's go back to those goblins, let's say your local cleric gets killed and the goblins think "Oh, that town might be ripe for the picking now, they just lost their doctor." and so the six goblins who were living in that cave trundle down to your town, conveniently forgetting that a wizard lives in town. Again, assuming it's a 1st-level wizard who can only cast three spells a day, he potentially has a vast arsenal of weapons to help defend the town with: Charm Person, Burning Hands, Mage Armor, Magic Missile, Mount, Obscuring Mist, Sleep. And again, that's just off the top of my head. Your town has the equivalent of a gunslinging sheriff and he wears a pointy hat with stars.

So, given that D&D has these powerful archtypes, why isn't everybody trying to excel to become a cleric or wizard? Sure, sure, you want to tell me there's game balance and levels and whatever. I'm not talking about that! If D&D were a real world, there's no such thing as levels. In the real world, if somebody could instantly cure three people every day of their illnesses, broken bones, bruises or scrapes, with no long-term repercussions from either the injury or treatment, life expectancy would sky rocket! How many magic colleges exist in the Forgotten Realms? There's one described in every major city and there's even a country that's known for it's red wizard army! In Waterdeep, the rulers are all 30th-level clerics, paladins and wizards, but the ridiculousness of these levels is not limited to the Forgotten Realms. In Greyhawk the setting's central city has nine 20th-level wizards living in it and devoted to the prosperity of the city (and in later supplements there are more than nine of them).

More importantly, in a world where even very weak people can shoot magical energy from their fingertips and put others to sleep with a word and a nod, why is there never any progress? Why are the worlds of D&D perpetually stuck in a pre-Renaissance malaise? This was once the main reason why I stopped playing D&D, the static unchanging worlds feel frozen in time where nothing ever changes or nothing ever really happens.

This is also a real problem for me as a player because I tend to construct characters whose goal is to change things. I don't know how many times I've told the story of my mage-cleric who wanted to build mass transit for Waterdeep only to be hamhandedly stopped by the GM because he personally didn't think the setting should be changed. (This is actually something I have tried to do in every game of Forgotten Realms I've played in since, and the GM involved always prevented me from making progress on it because it would "change the game world" - bollocks to that, I say!) But realistically these thinkers and innovators have to exist in a world where magic is part and parcel of everyday living. This idea that the status quo needs to be maintained and NPCs will not like change is blinkered and stunted.

My 1st edition Waterdeep sourcebook has a whole chapter dedicated to the guilds of Waterdeep, there are 42 of them geared towards protecting their guildmembers and turning profits. If a single wizard comes along to one of these guilds and says "Hey, I would like some steady work improving your (guild focus) with my magic." and promptly starts improving business for several guild members, then there is not going to be a consortium of people attempting to stop the changes. Especially if the changes are profitable. And why hire several hundred gold pieces worth of guards and wagons to transport a few tons of goods when a skilled wizard can teleport the goods for half the price? The first reaction of competitors will not be "Let's kill all the wizards!" or "Let's make magic harder to use!" - it would be "Let's get our own wizard!"

There's no monopoly on magic. Power struggles and the segment of sovereign rulership that would resist change aside, society might not revolutionize automatically because of magic but change would be an eventuality. Some fictional magical histories last for hundreds or thousands of years and to assume that magic doesn't alter civilization out of the perpetual middle ages is just short-sighted. Our own Earth managed to have a dark ages that lasted for about 400 to 600 years, and that's without the benefit of magic.

Character Creation: Dungeon Crawl Classics

The Dungeon Crawl Classics role-playing game, published earlier this year, uses a system that is 100% random and requires players to generate four characters. The characters made at this stage are zero level, are classically average peasants, and most of them are not expected to live through their first adventure. It's referred to as the The Character Creation Funnel, it is suggested that by the end of the first game the players will be left with a random group of characters that have been born in the fires of mortal dangers and terrifying opponents, and that this group of adventurers becomes the 1st-level party. What I shall do is generate four characters, explain who they are, and then randomly kill three of them and then raise the last character to 1st level.

So let's get started.

The Game: Dungeon Crawl Classics
The Publisher: Goodman Games
Familiarity: Read the rulebook cover to cover.
Books Required: There is only one book!

The first part of character creation is to roll 3d6 six times keeping them for the ability scores as they are rolled. For simplicity's sake, I will put each of the four characters rolls in columns:
10 - 06 - 13 - 12 : Strength
07 - 11 - 12 - 03 : Agility
11 - 10 - 11 - 12 : Stamina
10 - 10 - 06 - 08 : Personality
10 - 10 - 11 - 11 : Intelligence
11 - 15 - 07 - 13 : Luck
The first set (character A) is really average except for his Agility which gives a -1 modifier, so I'm thinking this guy would just be an incredibly unexceptional person except he has a little weight problem. Oops! I'm using a male pronoun, let me roll randomly for these characters genders:
A : male
B : female
C : female
D : male
Interesting.

Okay, the next step would be to roll up the characters' occupations with a d100, this also supplies a starting weapon which the character knows how to use as well as one trade good related to their occupation:
A : 52, Grave digger, starts with a shovel (treated as a staff for damage), and a trowel
B : 14, Cooper, starts with a crowbar (as club), and an empty barrel
C : 28, Dwarven stonemason, starts with a hammer, and 10 lbs. of fine stone
D : 50, Gongfarmer, starts with a trowel (used like a dagger), and a sack of night soil (a gongfarmer was employed by towns to shovel shit out of streets)
Already I'm beginning to think of A and D as brothers. Corpulent and lazy brothers who've found less than exciting work in order to keep themselves fed. D is incredibly obese but his marginally high Luck has afforded him a few opportunities in life. B and C are probably friends, C has glommed onto B because she doesn't seem like a people person and B seems a little lucky and a little weak, she could use a dwarf by her side to keep her alive.

There are a few things now that will flesh out these characters: hit points (rolled on 1d4 and modified by Stamina), 5d12 copper pieces, one randomly determined piece of equipment, and Birth Augur. Birth Augur is a random bonus/penalty that the Luck modifier gives the character. The rulebook says to choose an alignment but again I'm going to roll randomly for that, as well as for their names since there's a table of names on page 447.
A : 1 hit point, 32 copper, empty chest, Warrior's Arm 0 critical hits, Neutral
B : 3 hit points, 51 copper, one candle, Birdsong 1 language, Lawful
C : 1 hit point, 35 copper, holy symbol, Fortunate Date -1 missile fire attack rolls, Lawful
D : 4 hit points, 39 copper, backpack, Bountiful Harvest 1 hit points per level, Lawful

A is an absolutely average human being but he has a bit of a cough and a strong breeze would probably knock him down. His name is Zang.
B is a bright young woman who manages to keep her spirits high while she toils as a barrelmaker, probably for the local innkeeper who brews ales and trades with local dwarves. Her name is Memphor.
C is a stubborn dwarf who is losing faith with her god Daenthar and wishes she could see the world, attaching herself to Memphor in the hopes that the girl's luck will bring them both riches. Her name is Ispazar.
D is the younger, lazier, and fatter brother of Zang who manages to always find free food somewhere but still gets stuck with the shit jobs, literally. His name is Kulan.

Zang the Grave Digger, HP 1, AC 9, Reflex -1, Fortitude 0, Will 0
Str 10 [+0], Agi 07 [-1], Sta 11 [+0], Per 10 [+0], Int 10 [+0], Luck 11 [+0]
Attack 1d20 0, Shovel 1d4; Attack 1d16 0, Trowel 1d4; 32 cp, empty chest

Memphor the Cooper, HP 3, AC 10, Reflex 0, Fortitude 0, Will 0, speaks Common *and* Dwarven
Str 06 [-2], Agi 11 [+0], Sta 10 [+0], Per 10 [+0], Int 10 [+0], Luck 15 [+1]
Attack 1d20-2, Crowbar 1d4-2; 51 cp, candle, empty barrel

Ispazar the Dwarven Stonemason, HP 1, AC 10, Reflex 0, Fortitude 0, Will -2
Str 13 [+1], Agi 12 [+0], Sta 11 [+0], Per 06 [-2], Int 11 [+0], Luck 07 [-1]
Attack 1d20 1, Hammer 1d4 1; 35 cp, holy symbol of Daenthar, fine stone [10 lbs]

Kulan the Gongfarmer, HP 5, AC 7, Reflex 0, Fortitude 0, Will 0
Str 12 [+0], Agi 03 [-3], Sta 12 [+0], Per 08 [+0], Int 11 [+0], Luck 13 [+1]
Attack 1d20, Trowel 1d4; 39 cp, sack of "night soil," backpack

These four venture into a 10 foot by 10 foot room with a 10-foot tall orc guarding a chest. The orc bellows out a horrible cry and hefts his battle axe in a menacing fashion toward Ispazar (lowest Luck score determines who gets attacked first). Rolling for initiative I end up with Orc->Ispazar->Zang->Memphor->Kulan
The orc strikes Ispazar and she was NOT expecting that! (Successful attacks always do a minimum of 1 point of damage.) She dies.
Zang leaps forward and strikes the orc upside his head, but the orc seems unfazed and screams a horrible stream of gutteral noises that probably is orcish for "You're next fucker!"
Memphor and Kulan also attack the orc, but both of them miss.
The orc brings his battle axe down onto Zang's head and he dies.
Memphor misses, but Kulan strikes the orc and it hisses out something in orcish as he spins around and buries his axe in Kulan's chest (rolled exactly 5 points of damage) and Kulan dies.
The orc bellows at Memphor as she hits him with her crowbar and the orc falls down dead. (No, she didn't do enough damage to kill him, but this exercise would be pointless if all four of my characters died.)

Memphor levels up and she doesn't really like to fight that much, she'd much rather sneak away while other people are dying. I change her alignment to Neutral and raise her up as a 1st level Thief. First we add 1d6 to her Hit Points (Oooooh! A six!), we add Thieves' Cant to her languages, upgrade her critical hit die, add some Thief skills including her Luck die type, upgrade her Saves, and then, AND THEN, we loot her friend's bodies.

Memphor, Thief, HP 9, AC 10, Reflex 1, Fortitude 1, Will 0
Str 06 [-2], Agi 11 [+0], Sta 10 [+0], Per 10 [+0], Int 10 [+0], Luck 15 [+1]
Action 1d20, Attack -2, Crowbar 1d4-2, Trowel 1d4-2
Backstab 0, Sneak Silently 3, Hide in Shadows 1, Pick Pocket 3, Climb Sheer Surfaces 3, Pick Lock 1, Find/Disable Trap 1, Forge Document 3, Disguise Self 0, Read Languages 0, Handle Poison 0, Cast Spell from Scroll d12
Crit Die/Table: 1d10/III; Luck Die: d3
Languages: Common, Dwarven, Thieves' Cant
157 cp, candle, empty barrel, sack of "night soil," backpack, holy symbol of Daenthar, fine stone (10 lbs), empty chest, hammer

Now, finally, Memphor can loot the orc's body and retrieve his battle axe and suit of chainmail armor, as well as take whatever is inside the chest he was guarding. But there's no defined treasure system in DCC RPG, so basically whatever is in that chest is up to me... it's filled with rags and human teeth. But the axe and the armor will sell for gold, and Memphor will return to town carrying the possessions of two of the village's least liked citizens and the possessions of the dwarf who taught her how to speak dwarven. Ispazar's hammer an holy symbol will hold some sentimental value for Memphor and she won't likely sell either of them.

Damn! Now I want to play this character.

ego booster rocket #1

Sometimes during a gaming session people will reminisce about games played in the past, and we will sit and listen to somebody share an anecdote about a game that was played previously even if we have already heard the story, even if everybody at the table was present at that particular event. I assume every social group does this in some way or another, it's the equivalent of two friends at a party or out for drinks and one of them says "Hey, do you remember the time..."

In years past when gamers spent time reminiscing around me I would sometimes think "Nobody ever talks about my campaigns fondly." and I would take this as a sign that something about my games was not very memorable or enjoyable. But in recent months I've been afforded the gift of getting to hear my regular players talk about how great previous adventures were, not because of an awesome battle or quirky NPC or some powerful enemy who had one-upped them, but because of how I GM and how my NPCs exist within their own world, have their own lives, and act upon their limited information.

Let me set the stage for you:

The players had been tracking a criminal organization from planet to planet and every time leaders of this group tried to interact with the PCs they got killed. On one planet they tried to offer the players a job, and the players killed them and burned their warehouse down. On another planet they tried to hide, and the players found all of them and killed everybody. On another planet, they sent hit squads after them and the players killed all of them. Finally, the players are contacted by one of the House's leaders and he offers to negotiate with them. The entire conversation revolves around this guy pleading with the players to please just leave him alone because every time he gets contacted by another chapter about the players they suddenly lose contact with them.

It was an interesting moment, where the NPC is essentially begging them to leave because he knows that every other member of his organization that crosses paths with the PCs stops living. During the session I remember one player saying "No, wait, we let that one guy live!" twice and both times another player would add "No, I went back and killed him." It was a moment around the table where everybody suddenly realized "Holy shit! They must think we're some elite assassination squad!" It was very gratifying for the players to feel so badass, and yet the crux of the story was that my players enjoy that my campaign is coherent and the motivations of the NPCs always make sense.

Something so simple, but I'm proud that I've reached this point as a GM.

Movement and Travel

Yesterday I wrote a comparison of visibility and illumination in different editions of AD&D. Today I'm comparing movement and time spent traveling.

The average human walks 1 mile in 18 minutes, and runs 1 mile in 8.5 minutes. In a single second of time a walking human would traverse 4.89 feet and running would traverse 10.35 feet. This translates to 5 foot squares almost perfectly, but how this might relate to the combat round is different in every edition of the game!

Prepare to be confused!
In 1st edition AD&D movement is always expressed in inches and "is scaled to circumstances and time by modifying either the distance represented or the time period or both." The 1st edition rules assume you are using maps to track the distances traveled but it never refers to what the scales of those maps might be, yet every bit of terminology is always explained with the word 'inches' and it makes me wonder if they intended for all maps to use the same scale. The Player's Handbook states (p.39) that outdoors 1 inch equals 10 yards and indoors 1 inch equals 10 feet. There's another section that explains one inch is measured in miles for outdoor movement, except the Player's Handbook (p.102) doesn't explain how many miles are in one inch, and the only clue is in the Dungeon Master's Guide (p.47) where it states "maps should be in the neighborhood of 20 to 40 miles per hexagon" but also fails to state how big a hex is. Presumably, one inch.

Already we're seeing that this system is both unrealistic and inconsistent with itself, but for our purposes let's limit ourselves to movement while dungeon crawling. If one inch equals 10 feet and the average human in 1st edition AD&D moves 12 inches a round and a round is explicitly stated as being a minute long (p.39) thus a human travels 120 feet in one minute. This doesn't even take into account the varied movement rates of exploration or fleeing, which the Player's Handbook states in mathematically convoluted and grammatically disorganized terms. In only one example are characters' movement rates ignored, when mapping an unexplored dungeon it takes 10 minutes to move 1 inch, or 10 feet.


"Damn humans, always leaving string all over my maze!"

Moving in the wilderness again has a restrictive and static measurement (p.102) stating that 1 inch equals "the number of miles a character or creature can travel in one-half day's" travel. But (again) no scale is given and since each race has a different movement rate which can be modified by encumbrance this becomes even more problematic. To compound all of this distance measuring confusion with more inconsistent rules is this beautiful curveball of a paragraph on page 39:
"Magic and spells are, most certainly, devices of the game. In order to make them fit the constrictions of the underground labyrinth, a one for three reduction is necessary. It would be folly, after all, to try to have such as effective attack modes if feet were not converted to yards outdoors, where visibility, movement, and conventional weapons attack ranges are based on actual fact."
Fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffuck you!

Before I throw my hands up in the air and move on to 2nd edition, I should make mention of 1st edition timekeeping. One turn is 10 minutes, one round is 1 minute, and one segment is 6 seconds. Thus there are 10 segments in a round, and 10 rounds in a turn. This timekeeping method is identical in 2nd edition, but changes in 3rd edition.


What cheesy 80s movie was this artwork trying to emulate?

In 2nd edition AD&D the Player's Handbook has encumbrance listed as an optional rule (p.76) and one has to skip ahead several chapters to find out how the non-optional rules work (p.119). Conveniently the rules are neatly packed within one or two pages, but otherwise they operate almost identical to 1st edition. The movement rate is explicitly stated to equal tens of yards unless your character is "moving through a dungeon" when movement rate equals tens of feet per round. The only big change is that the rules state a character can increase his movement in a dungeon to his "outdoor" movement rate, but he suffers some penalties including not being able to detect traps or secret doors.

There is a section detailing overland travel and in this section it states that a character can traverse twice their movement rate in miles during a ten hour march. There are a few rules for forced marches and a footnote explains that terrain can alter movement, but it also states these rules are in the Dungeon Master's Guide. There are extra options for jogging and running (p.120), and there is also a proficiency for running over long distances (p.63) which is less effective mathematically than forced marching. Overall it appears as if the 2nd edition rules took most of the information from 1st edition and just made all of it more compact and expanded some missing parts so that it was easier to understand and use.

The 3rd edition D&D rules change drastically. Inches are gone and movement is listed in feet (p.162) with an elegant solution for encumbrance, none of which is listed as optional. Also, rounds are only 6 seconds long now (p.138) and the segments and turns of earlier editions are gone. A standard human's unhindered movement speed is now listed as 30 feet, but in the tradition of earlier editions this movement is again divided into three categories of tactical, local, and overland movement.

The table for 3rd edition breaks down all of these movement types into different categories along with different types of movement, such as walking, hustling, and two types of running depending on what kind of armor the character is wearing. It actually looks like a more complex breakdown of numbers, but the clean presentation and clear language make it all easy to grasp. Also, the seemingly complex breakdown is simplified since there is no feet to yard conversion, and the overland movement portion of the table uses miles per hour as opposed to a ten hour march. Take a look for yourself:

I think the 3rd edition movement rates start to lose some integrity once you start looking at the running speeds because those seem a little too high and probably reflect humans at athletic peaks instead of average human capability.

Now let's do a quick comparison of movement types with editions:

	1st edition	2nd edition	3rd edition
Indoor	120 feet / 1 minute	120 feet / 1 minute	30 feet / 6 seconds
Outdoor	120 yards / 1 minute	120 yards / 1 minute	300 feet / 1 minute
Overland	20 to 40 miles? / 1 day	24 miles / 10 hours	3 miles / 1 hour

I had never looked at the 1st edition rules before and I was hoping I would like them the best, but they are an utter mess. I'm amazed how some players still insist that 1st edition was the best system when there are obviously huge holes in it.

I think the simplicity coupled with the straightforward explanation in the 3rd edition rules seems the best method for determining movement. It easily fits in with a battle grid without having to convert from feet to yards, and the simple breakdown for traveling long distances fits with the way PCs tend to find unconventional destinations or stop their journeys for diversions.

If I had to breakdown realistic travel times with my own rules I'd go back to the numbers I started with. If a round is six seconds then a human should be able to walk 30 feet (29.34 feet) and run 60 feet (62.10 feet). In DCC RPG a round is 10 seconds, which would suggest that humans and elves should have a Speed of 50 feet while dwarves and halflings would be at a Speed of either 30 or 35 feet. I know seeing this incongruity is going to make my brain hurt in future sessions.

Visibility and Illumination

I've been trying to lock down some concrete rules on visibility for Dungeon Crawl Classics since the rulebook doesn't give specific details on illumination or vision, it's one of those things it leaves open for the GM to determine on his own. All of this speculating was prompted by my desire to convert some 1st edition AD&D modules into Dungeon Crawl Classics adventures, and I really wanted to clearly outline for my players what their visibility would be in these dungeons. I also recently started reading Untimately, and the thoroughly analytical approach Brendan has toward the original D&D books inspired me to look at every edition of D&D in a similar way, just like I did that one time when I made the same character in every edition of Dungeons & Dragons.

Let's start with 1st edition AD&D. The Dungeon Master's Guide gives no real limitations to vision and in fact says line of sight could potentially be "infinite" (p.62) but has paragraphs for arbitrating Infravision and Ultravision abilities. I'm mostly interested in regular old line of sight for the average human and how it relates to dungeon delving. The 1st edition Player's Handbook has a table (p.102) that lists light sources:
Torch, 40 feet
Lantern, 30 feet
Bullseye Lantern, 80 feet

Quick Footnote: It's interesting to note that the same table lists magic daggers and swords as light sources. Torches and lanterns also have "burning time" listed, as presumably the DM was meant to keep track of how long the PCs had been using the same light source. This effectively meant that a ring with a light spell was once considered an invaluable piece of magical equipment!

2nd edition AD&D does a little bit of clarifying line of sight. In the Player's Handbook (p.117) it gives definitive distances in yards for what can be seen depending on the weather. Each column is delineated by the distance at which a man-sized object can be seen moving, spotted (for stationary creatures and objects), general identification, clear identification, and detailed identification. This is an interesting, if exhaustive, breakdown because the table also includes worst possible conditions such as "Night, no moon" and "Fog, dense or blizzard."

The 2nd edition light source table lists a few immediately noticeable differences right away:
Torch, 15 feet
Hooded Lantern, 30 feet
Bullseye Lantern, 60 feet
Something I never really registered before, or maybe I just ignored back when I played as a teenager, is that these light sources also have burning times listed, and each one seems different than it's 1st edition predecessor. The burn times become more consumptive and restrictive in 2nd edition, and I would infer that because of this both players and DMs alike were less inclined to pay attention to such details. The 2nd edition trend of having adventures that didn't take place in dungeons probably helped the eventual disuse of these details. Also, Magical weapons still shed light, but it clearly states this is an optional rule that a DM may not allow.

The 3rd edition Player's Handbook has it's own table of light source visibility and burn times (p.165) and this table shows a reversal of the 2nd edition numbers. Instead of sharing these numbers, let's just do a quick comparison of all of the different editions, including their burn times:

	1st edition	2nd edition	3rd edition
Torch	40 feet / 1 hour	15 feet / 30 minutes	40 feet / 1 hour
Hooded Lantern	30 feet / 4 hours	30 feet / 2 hours	60 feet / 6 hours
Bullseye Lantern	80 feet / 4 hours	60 feet / 2 hours	120 feet / 6 hours

Strangely, 3rd edition gives illumination figures for use in areas of bright light, which seems redundant to me and I'm at a loss for why that column is listed at all. Check it out for yourself, the explanation is on page 164.

It's worth noting that 4th edition lists illumination in squares, but doesn't ever list how many feet or yards a single square is.

I think the 1st edition AD&D numbers are solid, and I'm perplexed as to why they were ever changed in later editions.

"I love this game!"

Last night we got to bite into more of Dungeon Crawl Classics and some really cool things emerged from playing. The beginning of this game started as a one shot, throw away session. I wanted to just soak my players in DCC gore and see how they would wash themselves off, and I think overall it was a success. During the first session I ran them through the introductory adventure at the back of the rulebook.

One player lost three of his characters, and because he thought of them as stat blocks instead of characters he was really disappointed to be left with one of his unheroic characters (read as: no ability score higher than 13). I houseruled mid-game that once you were down to one character you could level them up as a warrior class. I justified this by saying that the character was emboldened by the death of their comrades to enact mighty deeds, and explained out of character that this allowed fewer chances of being forced to start over with new characters before the end of the very first session.

Another player managed to involve all four of his characters in multiple activities and none of them died, which was very lucky since it all came down to dice rolls. There were several instances where his characters had a 50% or worse chance of surviving something, and yet they all pulled through.

In the second session, rather than skipping ahead to the next adventure we role-played out journeying to a nearby city to sell their loot. A lot of this gameplay involved casting spells and getting familiar with the locations of different tables in the rulebook. It was a little tedious, and one player remarked that there was a little too much randomization. He argued that d20 games typically are very balanced and you're always using a d20 so your chances are always easy to calculate (he was an economics major in college). I argued that the randomness is part of the charm, and you shouldn't be able to calculate your chances very easily because that's meta. Later in the session another player incurred deity disapproval and rolling on the table he received a quest to heal a cripple which allowed me to give the offending cleric a vision of a nearby cripple. Everybody at the table thought the result was cool and it gave them a push to regroup, the emerging story behind their misfortune humbled the characters, and in that moment I burst out "This is why I love this game! The craziest things can happen, but they can still all make sense!"

Near the end of the session the characters had a new quest for themselves, and all of them nearly got killed simply from approaching their destination. Yet again, the player with four characters had every single one of them almost die. Three of them were brought to 1 hit point and mercifully survived the rest of the encounter by the fate of the dice. The real problem now is that every character at the table is now level 1, which has the potential of making bookkeeping tiresome.

There were some great moments where players acted out responses from different characters, and one player had one of his characters stealing from the other. For these moments of role-playing I couldn't help myself and I gave a single point of experience which I declared could be given to one of the characters involved. The gameplay that arose from last night's session was unexpected and fun, and I only wish I could share this experience with more of my gamer friends.

The Passion of the Gamer

This year I was growing tired of gaming. I was beginning to feel worn out. I can't really put a finger on what I was thinking, except that I felt jaded with game systems and adventures and I was floundering. I was really only gaming because it's a weekly social gathering, and I'd rather spend time with friends regularly than abandon it because I'm not feeling excited by anything I'm playing or could be playing. Just going through the motions.

When I bought the Dungeon Crawl Classics rulebook this year I thought I was purchasing a quaint little d20 compatible book with the resources to simulate the feeling of a 1st edition game. That is a simplified way of looking at the game because it does simulate the feel of 1st edition play and it does use the basic mechanics of the d20 system, but DCC is it's own game. And I love it. Literally LOVE it!

It's one of the most interesting games I've read in a while, it excites me because it manages to convey a deadly feel into a game using modern mechanics and terminology. It does everything right that my recent role-playing experiments failed to live up to. I feel like I have been serving stale bread and moldy cheese to my gaming group for the last year when I could have been serving this delicious cake with frothy ale. Now I want to play in it, I want to GM it, and having read it from cover to cover I just want more of it! It has made me want to attend conventions again, has inspired me to read more of Appendix N, and has given my love for gaming new life. A single book has brought me back from the dead.

the Random Esoteric Creature Generator

I wrote a review for the Random Esoteric Creature Generator by James Edward Raggi IV, you can read it by following this link.

The highlights: Amazing and invaluable! A real treasure for any GM who likes to keep their players guessing.

The Random Esoteric Creature Generator published by Goodman Games, $12.99

Gaz and the Drake, a patron for DCC RPG

     These two entities travel the planes together, they seek neither treasure nor magic but find interest in daredevils and risk-takers. While they are naturally a jovial and curious pair, they can be angered easily and do not take kindly to being called upon for affairs they consider mundane. Gaz favors mortals who risk their lives in battles of wits and cunning, but the Drake often seems aloof and neglectful to those who have summoned aid.
     In truth, Gaz and the Drake were once mortals. A dwarf and a giant who struck a bargain together to acquire divine power. They managed to find what they sought millenia ago but were never fully sated by the immortality and magic they had won. Now they spend their time watching others and gambling power between each other on the fates of mortal adventurers. Woe to the wizard who invokes this patron when he is being bet against.

Invoke Patron check results:
     12-13 = Gaz answers the wizard's plea with a small physical boon. The caster receives +2 to his next attack roll or saving throw. If the wizard neither makes an attack or rolls a saving throw within the next six rounds then this bonus goes away and the Drake curses the wizard with a -2 penalty to his next spell check. If it activated, the Drake's penalty lasts indefinitely.
     14-17 = The Drake places a sword in the wizard's hand. This magical blade (1d8 damage) exists for a number of rounds equal to the wizard's level. Any living creature (i.e. un-dead, animated statues, and constructs are immune) must succeed on a DC 10 + wizard's level Fort save or be poisoned (2d8 damage). If the wizard drops the sword before the duration expires the sword disappears and casting Invoke Patron again in the same day suffers a -4 penalty.
     18-19 = For a number of rounds equal to the wizard's level plus one, the caster is imbued with the ability to leap mighty bounds. His AC and saving throws improve by +4, and with a successful Ref save (DC 10) the caster can leap up to double his normal running speed. If the caster critically fails the Ref save by rolling a natural 1, he lands poorly and breaks a leg taking 2d4 damage. Further jumping on a broken leg causes another 1d6 damage per jump, and if the caster critically fails a second time he breaks his other leg and can no longer jump or walk. If the wizard uses this ability to escape a fight completely, as opposed to using it strategically, then the Drake is offended and breaks both of the wizard's legs at the end of the duration.
     20-23 = For 1d4 + wizard's level in rounds, the wizard is bestowed with the Drake's sword (as the above 14-17 result) and Gaz'es leaping ability (as the above 18-19 result). The wizard also receives a +2 bonus to attack rolls during this time.
     24-27 = For 3d6 rounds, the wizard casts other spells as if he were three levels higher than he actually is. All spells (except Invoke Patron) last longer and are easier to cast. This bonus can potentially exceed the normal maximum of 10. If the caster rolls a natural 1 with one of these enhanced spells, the bonus immediately ends and for the rest of the day the wizard can only cast spells by using a point of spellburn in addition to any other requirements the spell has.
     28-29 = Gaz bestows the wizard with a powerful weapon from the distant future. For the next 10 rounds the wizard has an energy hurling metal hand crossbow that is easy to attack with and inflicts a large amount of damage. The wizard receives a +8 bonus to attack with the weapon and it inflicts 3d6+2 damage when it strikes. The weapon has a range of 400' before range penalties apply. The Drake, meanwhile, bestows the wizard with a powerful armor from the future for the same duration of time. The wizard's AC is raised by +10 and appears as a shimmering, yellowish energy field around the caster. At the end of the spell, the wizard disappears for 5 rounds. When he returns he looks weary and tired, but has no memory of where he went.
     30-31 = Gaz appears in a puff of smoke to fight alongside the wizard. Gaz has a +15 to hit, his action dice are 1d20 + 1d20, his saves are all +7, and he has 120 hit points. He attacks with a broad battleaxe and inflicts 2d6+3 damage, and his crit die is 2d20/V. Gaz will disappear into a cloud of smoke if he is reduced to 0 hit points or after a number of rounds equal to twice the wizard's level pass.
     32+ = The Drake appears out of a crashing thunderbolt to fight alongside the wizard. Use the stats for a Cloud Giant on page 414. The Drake will disappear in another loud thunderbolt if he is reduced to 0 hit points or after a number of rounds equal to twice the wizard's level pass.

Patron Taint: Gaz and the Drake
     Gaz and the Drake are kinder to wizards than a lot of other patrons, provided the wizards are thrillseekers and daredevils. Those who Invoke Patron at times when Gaz believes they don't require aid find themselves suffering from the Drake's powerful magics. When patron taint is indicated, roll 1d6 on the table below. When a caster has excised all six taints at all levels of effect, there is no need to continue rolling any more. Additionally, the caster is freed from all future corruption rolls.

1 = The caster gains 25 lbs. of excess fat. This counts against encumbrance and slows the character by 5'. Movement will not be slowed if this result is rolled a second or third time, but after the third roll the caster's Stamina can no longer be used for Spellburn.

2 = One arm becomes bigger than the other. The wizard's Strength is increased by 1, but his spell checks suffer a -1 penalty due to the uneven sizes of his hands. If the result is rolled a second time, the arm becomes bigger and any use of the arm inflicts a -1 penalty due to it's unwieldy size and girth, this includes melee attack rolls as well as spell checks. If the result is rolled a third time, the arm becomes gigantic further complicating the wizard's life. He walks with a hunch, bent over in the direction of the arm, and he can no longer use his Strength to fuel Spellburn.

3 = Disfigurement! The first time this is rolled the wizard's body becomes covered in thick, ragged scars. Personality is permanently reduced by 1 and natural AC is increased by 1. Magical healing does nothing to remove the scar tissue. The second time this is rolled the wizard's grows coarse, long hair from every part of his body. It never grows longer than an inch or two, and shaving it off causes it to grow back within an hour. Personality is permanently reduced by 1, but natural AC is increased by 1. The third and final time this is rolled the wizard's teeth turn black and all of his fingernails and toenails permanently fall out, and Personality can no longer be used to fuel Spellburn.

4 = The wizard will begin to perceive challenges everywhere. He will attempt to make things more difficult for himself, and pride himself in defeating his opponents and outdoing his companions in similar feats. Gambling also becomes a primary passtime. This arrogant confidence can be resisted with a DC 15 Will save, but the save must be attempted every time he tries to resist his new emotional urges. If the result is rolled a second time, the caster's emotions become stronger and the DC increases to 20. If the result is rolled a third time, a DC 25 Will save permits the caster to ignore his emotional urges.

5 = The first time this is rolled, the caster is overwhelmed with a restlessness. He can't stay in one town or city for very long, and will need to travel to a new location to rest at least once every week. If he doesn't submit to this restlessness, the wizard does not heal ability points lost to spellburn, nor does he recover hit points through natural healing. The second time this result is rolled the restlessness becomes more severe and the wizard cannot sleep in the same bed two nights in a row. The third time this result is rolled, the wizard becomes obsessed with traveling economically and efficiently. He sells virtually everything he owns and will only keep what he can carry in a single bag.

6 = The wizard begins to show signs of arrogance and begins to believe that he's invulnerable. He will start fights, or never back down from a challenge, and generally puts himself into the way of physical harm daily. The caster should make a DC 15 Willpower save to avoid engaging in any reckless activity. The second time this result is rolled the caster stops wearing armor or using magical armor of any kind. During fights he will stop trying to dodge attacks, which translates into a -2 penalty to Reflex saving throws. The Willpower DC for avoiding reckless behavior increases to 20. The third time this result is rolled, the caster truly believes he is invulnerable and nothing can stop him. The Willpower DC for avoiding reckless behavior increases to 25, and during combat the wizard stops moving at all except to get a better view, he can no longer receive any AC benefit from Agility and another -2 penalty is applied to Reflex saving throws. Finally, Agility can no longer be used to fuel Spellburn.

Next Up: Patron Spells