Category: D20

From a GChat with the DM in my once-a-month DnD game:

12:59 PM Dale: Congratulations: your character gets 175 xp in celebration of you living another year 😉

Cha-ching.

It is something of an irony that the players in my d20 game have been so interested and involved and generally pleased with the last couple sessions that have followed the dungeon-crawl-that-wouldn’t-end. Having well and truly poisoned the well with regards to combat (six months of nothing but pretty much put paid to that need for awhile), I’ve been digging in with what can best be described as Bangs for each of the characters (there are about 3 too many players for this to be wholly effective, but it’s basically working), and we haven’t rolled more than a handful of dice per session in that time.
It’ll never last — I haven’t got the stamina to make things up on the fly in d20 forever and the system works against anything of the kind, really — but right now we’re doing some interesting things and I’ve gotten folks to a point where they’ll be willing to put their characters away pretty soon and call the whole thing good.
After that, I’m looking forward to trying out HeroQuest and some other systems — still a little surprised at some of the resistance to anything-but-d20 that I keep running into, but them’s the breaks. I have to acknowledge that I run games better when the system doesn’t fight more freeform story construction and try to find a system that let’s me run a better game in the genre that both I and the players find interesting.

You can get a pretty cool player-driven narrative out of 3e play. See here.

I’ve heard a lot of interesting stuff about the new Conan RPG from Mongoose publishing — that it gives players alot of input on the story, et cetera — the sorts of things that currently flip my skirt up — whatever.
I’d also heard that the author both read Sorcerer, Sorcerer & Sword, and talked quite a bit with Ron Edwards about narrativist play.
Well, lookie lookie, here’s a d20 and narratavism thread that pretty much documents part of that evolution.
Kinda makes me want to go get that damn book. Again. Bleah.
I particular like this “how to help make d20 more character-driven” idea.

…personality feats.
The mechanic is simple – you take a thematic feat that has some sort of behavior associatited with it, and when you follow that behavior, you gain an action point (one per session). The action point can be spent for a roll bonus, or can be turned in at the end of the session for xp for the whole party. That last bit is genius, since it makes even the most gamist players willing to tolerate non-optimal behavior from their compatriots in the name of role playing because there’s a tangible reward for it (for gearheads, the xp reward for a single point is the same as an encounter of a level equal to the party’s average level).
There’s a sampler of the rules with some example feats in pdf form here. The only thing I should add is that the common practice (Even by Mr. Aylott, or so I’m told) is to give each character one personality feat for free.

I don’t know that it encourages the players to step in and add to the overall plotting, but it’s a great thing for getting traditional KIAMO-style players to get into character a bit. I’ll have to check out the game they mention the idea comes form.

As noted here:
Where d20 breaks down is when it shifts to non-combat rolls where the entire task (skill) is handled with a single, linear-odds roll.
Here’s how to fix that.
There’s a little known optional combat rule that states that people can choose to ‘roll’ their AC every round. Basically, you don’t have a Base 10 AC… figure out whatever you’ve got over 10, call that your “AC Bonus”, and add that to a d20 roll every time you’re attacked.
I doubt anyone does that — hell, I doubt anyone knows it’s there — but look in the DMG.
ANYWAY: while I don’t recommend it for combat necessarily, I think it would be useful for Skill Checks. Many of these are Opposed Rolls anyway — this little house-rule would make all Skill checks opposed.
Find the current DC for a skill. Subtract 10. Whatever’s left over is the DC Bonus. When someone tries to do something to overcome that challenge, the GM rolls a d20 and adds that DC bonus.
What does this do? Two main things.
1. Creates a pyamidal instead of linear success curve. In the case of a Thief with Open Locks +15 vs. a Lock with a DC bonus of +15 (formerly a DC 25 lock):
00.25% You Crit succeed, it crit fails.
02.50% You Crit, it fails
49.5% You succeed, it fails (or, you tie each other)
44.75% You fail, it succeeds.
02.50% You fail, it crit succeeds
00.25% You crit fail, it crit succeeds
00.25% Mutual Fumble
It’s a pyramid curve, but it’s a curve.
2. Removes instances of “Ugh… I got a 19… I know that d20 modules always set the DC’s in five-point increments on everything, so I’ll spend an Action Dice to give me a boost… worse case scenario, I get to a 20, and maybe I’ll get to the 25 break point.” (Particularly annoying on Gather Information charts, when adding the AD will almost certainly glean more info)… If the DC’s are d20+5, d20+10, d20+15, et cetera instead of 15, 20, 25… there wouldn’t be those artifical ‘rungs’ in the DCs to shoot for… that d20+5 DC might be, on your try, a net DC 6 all the way up to a net DC 25… every NPC you talk to is talkative in different ways, after all.

Overheard on The Forge :: d20 vs. 3d6, regarding “linear curves”.

D20 combat is really a die pool system (rolling multiple dice and counting sucessess) in disguise. You roll so many to-hits on single d20s in any given combat that, over the course of a battle, you get a reasonable normal distribution of expected results. Where d20 breaks down is when it shifts to non combat where the entire task is handled with a single roll, and you don’t get this faux pool effect. This is why Take 10 and Take 20 were invented [and, Doyce would add, rolling to Assist…] to patch the weakness of using linear single-rolls for everything other than combat […] increasing the likelihood of getting the expected result.

And… they’re right. One of the things I’ve realized that I really like about the games that I’m currently looking over is that they’re ALL either (a) dice pool mechanics or (b) single-dice mechanics with a means of earning re-rolls or (c) both.
I’ve always liked dice pools — ever since Shadowrun 1 came out. (Roll and add: not so much.) Really negates the chance of Being Good and Sucking Anyway — if you’re good at something, you’re adding not only to your skill, but actually affecting the odds of rolling good numbers.

One of the things I said in the comments on this post regarded the way that d20 (or some other ‘classic’ games) de-protagonize the player character though those instances where you’ve got this great character that blows stuff he’s supposed to be good at.
Eventually, that’s the character they become, and they aren’t the guy you wanted to play anymore.
There’s the other side to that: the situtation where you absolutely nail something you’re really not that good at. One of the examples from a recent game was in Dave’s spycraft game a few sessions back — my character was trying to occupy the guards at the front gate while the rest of the team engaged in a firefight in the back of the house. My plan (very impromptu) was to keep them tied down by pulling up in front of the gate and engaging in a firefight.
Three rounds (and three 20’s) later, I had all three guys disarmed or unconcious and was busy shackling them to the gate.
Now, I’ll give Spycraft this much: you have some control on when and how you’re going to suck and rock — I got the 20’s but I had to spend… Karma, for all intents and purposes, to really capitalize on the luck of the roll.
I didn’t have to do that… I could have left them as normal hits and saved the karma dice to spend on something I’m supposed to be good at, either to capitalize on good rolls or alleviate bad ones.
But damn, we needed break right about then — and I got greedy — so now I’m reconciling smooth-talking, psych-degree, professional profiler Agent McEvitt with “Shotgun Dylan”. Something I can deal with, yes… but noteworthy in that it is something that needs to be dealt with.
Just sayin’.
“Uncharacteristic Success” wasn’t something that it had occured to me as something that could blow your concept as well.

So I wrapped up the OA campaign last Friday night with the the most unwrap-uppy wrap-up I’ve ever done. Let’s go over the salient points:
I introduced a new Evil Faction.
I reintroduced a new Bad Guy.
I failed utterly to bring closure to any of the various personal storylines going on, merely advancing them slightly and leaving them dangling in tantilizing ways.
In short, I did little more than leave things in a very good position for a sequel campaign. So good, in fact, that my players are already asking for it. (For which I partly blame Last Samurai).
And yes, I’m considering it. But not now, and not soon. I accomplished the closure of one of the campaigns I was trying to close up, and I’m going to revel in that for awhile (and keep plugging away at the end of the current DnD game).

Sunday: Finished up the second serial in Dave’s In Deo Confidemus :: Spycraft campaign in a blaze of gunfire (mostly not ours, surprise surprise) and a couple of fine moments for [self-centered] my own character[/self-centered], the most married man in the entire intelligence community, ever.
(Crap, Dylan still needs to call his wife.)

While talking about something else, Bryant mentioned something called the “No Myth meme”, which sounds vaguely interesting, especially when combined with task resolution:

The No Myth meme rejects preplotting altogether; a No Myth GM doesn?t know anything about the world other than what the players have seen; a failed task resolution check doesn?t mean the players have failed, it means there?s an additional obstacle in the way of reaching whatever objective the players have chosen. And that?s a reasonable approach.

This gives me something of an insight into how one would logically be able to run certain kinds of games in d20, even with low-level characters: if failure (one a skill check, for instance) actually just results in the situation become one level more complicated, then you have a framework in which a 1st level character can play in any sort of game at all — some situations may be (or become) too complex to be worth the effort of resolving, but you don’t have to worry about a situation where simple low-level skill scores make it impossible to succeed at certain tasks.
GM: “The door’s locked.”
Player: “I pick the lock. I did that last time I was through here.”
GM: “Let’s have a roll.”
Player: [rolls] “Ulp… umm… how about a 5? Total.”
GM: “Well, it was easy enough the last time you worked this door, but this time you get over-eager and snap the lockpicks off in the lock. How will you approach the problem now?”
Granted, I’m not sure this can apply in ‘opposed’ situations (sneaking versus someone else’s listen, or, more obviously, combat), but in most other cases it should be pretty doable.
I can certainly see applications for this in some genres. Pulp is a good example, as is any sort of fantasy setting with lots of intrigue, and of course I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that it works really well in a Spycraft campaign. I can think of any number of situations in, say, Alias where, by failing, the protagonist simply causes the situation to become more complicated.
Sneak in and steal something.
Snag fingerprint to get into door.
> Take too long in the lab (blew the first search roll).
>> Have to talk your way past guard who, since you took so long, noticed you leaving the area.
Eventually, you get to a point where, if you’ve screwed up quite a bit, you find yourself strapped to a chair and getting dosed on sodium pentathol, but really that’s just another level of complication to deal with.
(Or, in a 1st-level Amber campaign, Corwin just built up so many complications in his first assault on Amber that he ended up blinded and stuck in a dungeon cell. 🙂

OGL, D20 compatible CROSSGEN Campaign setting?
Hmm.

Having finally had a chance to play through some Spycraft stuff, I can finally see what people have been saying — the combat system changes take it head-and-shoulders above the standard d20 combat system. Fluid, smooth, and much more intuitive to a non-tactically-thinking gamer, they literally made it possible to ‘do what the guys in the movies do’ without having to have read a book on squad tactics, or know anything about the system works with regard to cover and the like.
The skill and feat system? Ditto. I’ll lay most of my enjoyment at the feet of the GM and fellow players, but I must say this is a hugely improved d20 system varient.
[Addendum: As a GM, Dave stays in character with his NPCs much better than I do. Much much better. Much]

The clearest review of 3.5 that I’ve seen is here:

This release is like Microsoft charging for software updates. If you love the operating system and are devoted to it, you’ll buy it. If you’re a casual user, you’ll ignore it until a time comes when you need it, or have the means to get it. If you’re a first-time user, by all means, this is for you. If you prefer another operating system, it becomes moot. If you thought 3.0 and the D20 system was “broken”, a common euphemism for “these rules aren’t to my taste so let’s just hate them”, you’re not going to be impressed by 3.5, either.

Via SfAD, the UPC Bar Code Character Generation.

Jackie got an email notice today that her 3.5 PHB is shipping.
Me? Nothing. Why? Because I preordered my stuff too soon.
Yeah. A lovely but little-known fact of Amazon pre-orders is that, once they get the book in, they start shipping out in reverse order of the date the order was placed.
So… the longer you wait to pre-order, the faster you’ll get the book. Makes a hell of a lot of sense.

Mongoose Publishing: Babylon 5 RPG, due to hit local shops any day now.
I’m only surprised it took this long for someone to get this license. I’m not surprised it’s d20.

All the previews are up on the web site. Tidbits include a sneak peek at the rules for Telepathy and a few of the major characters on board Babylon 5 — including Sinclair and Ivanova.
Fiery Trial, the first story arc, will be shipping to distributors this week.

I’m of two minds about this. First: cool. Mongoose is going the way of the licensed BESM products: half game-book, half sourcebook, so that there’s lots of good stuff even if you’re ‘just’ a fan of the show with no interest in the game. They repeat a number of times in the production blurbs that the book is ‘more detailed than anything you’ve ever seen from yadda yadda yadda’, so that’s good.
Second: this is Mongoose. Mongoose is a mixed bag for me — on one hand, I like their stuff, but on the other, they have a REAL tendency to come up with REALLY COOL IDEAS that are in no way balanced within the d20 system.
Emphasis: Often really cool. Often not balanced.
For an example, I present the Quintessential Monk book — the ‘varied paths’ that they came up with for monks, coming up with ‘substitution sets’ of alternate feats for the free stuff that monks get as they progress to give you a dozen ‘variant’ monks that are nicely balanced… that’s beautiful.
The prestige classes from the same book? An abomination before man and GM. Wow. Absolute crap. Cool concepts? Absolutely. But game busters? Wow.
So you’ll have to understand my trepidation — do I think they’re going to come up with some great ways of handling the deep, intriguing bits of the B5 setting. I think they will be fantastic at that… Story they understand.
Game balance? Well, we’ll see.

Compiled list of stuff that I’ve picked up regarding the d20 v3.5

Continue reading “3.5”

Found a good one in the Quintessential Fighter:
CALLED SHOTS
There are many more ways to cripple and defeat an enemy besides simply swing a weapon at him again and again. Some instead choose to aim their blows at specific body parts, not only dealing damage but hindering the enemy’s ability to keep fighting.
How it works:
You can make a variety of called shots, provided you meet the requirements listed below.
1. First, you must score a threat against your target.
2. Rather than rolling to confirm a crit, you announce “Called shot to [body part]” instead, then make the roll that would normally confirm the threat.
3. The base damage is applied normally, but if the confirmation roll succeeds, consult the chart below rather than doing normal critial damage.

Arm
• Requirement: BAB +2 or greater
• Effect: Victim drops held item. 1d4 damage. -4 to all checks and attack rolls using wounded arm.
• Duration: d6 rounds

Leg
• Requirement: BAB +2 or greater
• Effect: 1d4 damage. Speed halved. Climb, Jump, and Swim @ -4.
• Duration: d6 rounds

Groin
• Requirement: BAB +2 or greater
• Effect: Victim Staggered for d6 rounds.

Head
• Requirement: BAB +8 or greater
• Effect: 1d4 damage. Stunned: Loses Dex bonus to AC, can take no actions, attackers +2 to attack victim.
• Duration: d4 rounds.

Eye
• Requirement: BAB +10 or greater
• Effect: 1d6 damage. -4 to all Dex-based checks. Two such injuries = blindness.
• Duration: d6 hours, eye loss possibly permanent (DC 15 Fort to avoid)

Called shots only work against the same sorts of targets that Critical Hits are Effective against. The effects of these can be negated early with the use of Cure spells or Healing checks. (Unless referring to permanent eye loss, which would require regeneration.
Also: There are variant rules for monks that cause similar effects in combat. They are different in that they require Stunning Attacks instead of critical hits (so are more controllable) and allow Fort Save. Also, they can be targeted against more body locations.
Use of those rules for “Pressure Point Attacks” doesn’t mean that monks cannot also use this rule when they score a threat.

I’m taking a ‘regular campaign’ hiatus for the month of November so I can do other stuff-that-is-not-gaming. Interesting conversation today.
Player: So are you dropping [game] permanently or starting it back up after November?
Me: I’m starting it back up for sure.
Player: Oh. [pause] I don’t think you should.
Sometimes I become glaringly aware that I have no idea what’s going on around me in terms of my friends and acquaintances. It was (apparently) true in college (something that’s become clear to me in recent months, talking with my old college friends), and it seems as though I’m pretty well out of the loop even today.

I found someone to run Living Arcanis for me this weekend so I can play the module instead of GMing it.
Kethos will ride again. Yee-haw.

I’m so there, man.

We’re coming up on a changing of the guard, I think. People’s schedules are changing, including mine, and I forsee a major alteration in my regular gaming schedule, probably within the next month.
Not sure what I think of that.

I’ve finally added a link to the Pulp Adventures! website on the linkbar to the left. (The only reason I hadn’t up to this point was technical complications that would have come up with certain search engines.)
At any rate, this thing has been taking up a big chunk of my time lately, especially at cons, and I’m really excited about what we’re working on — in a few more months, we should have all the requirements completely in place to become an official member-run “Living” campaign for the RPGA. This means that people will be able to download and play the available scenarios anywhere the RPGA is active, using characters that gain benefits and experience as the storylines progress (yeah, just like in a normal campaign, but participating in the storyline with hundreds of other gamers). The fact that this could be a very popular and fun thing to be working on is a benefit — the fact that the whole thing is set in the Pulp genre of the 30’s makes the whole thing a blast.
After an abortive attempt at creating some gaming products last year, Rey and I have sort of fallen backwards into this and already accomplished even more than we’d originally planned for the other project.
It’s been easy (except for all the ass-busting labor). Go check it out.

This weekend, I play-tested Rey’s Pulp Adventures module that we’re debuting at Tacticon next month. Good stuff.
I was playing Tony Vincetti, “Professional Driver” (read: New York cabbie). Tony’s quick on his feet, and quite personable when you get to know him, but in the words of one of the other players at the table “not the sharpest knife in the drawer.” Here’s a sample:
Interpol agent: “The Doctor has escaped a prison for the criminally insane in Rouen.”
Tony: “Well Jeez, put him in a place that ain’t fallin’ down, for starters.”
On encountering french food:
Tony: “What’s this?”
French PC: “Quiche.”
Tony: “Excuse me?”
French PC: “Quiche.”
Tony: “Hey, that reminds me of somethin’ I heard about you French girls, c’mere a second…”
Later:
French PC: “No no, eet is Quiche.”
Tony: “Oh, that’s what you call eatin’. You french guys gotta different word for everything.”
Talking to French guard
Tony: “You like doing guard work? My cousin does that and he likes it.”
Guard: “Eet is veree good.”
Tony: “You guys get holidays off, like the Fourth of July?”
Guard: “No, we do not celebrate the Fourth of July.”
Tony: “… what?”
Guard: “We do not celebrate the Fourth of July. [Short pause, then he adds, trying to be helpful.] We celebrate the Fourteenth of July instead.”
Tony: “[thinking] Oh, sure, cuz of the international date line. That makes sense.”

Okay folks, this looks like what I’ve got on the upcoming game schedule, both from Friday night stuff and what I’ll simply label “other”.
June 14 (Friday): Star Wars
June 15 (Saturday): JSquad & Cry Havoc
June 21 (Friday): DnD
June 22 (Saturday): Living Force catch-up at the house
June 28 (Friday): Star Wars
June 29 (Saturday): Weekend in Greyhawk thing (up at Red Rocks?) & Cry Havoc
June 29 (Sunday): More Weekend in Greyhawk 😛
July 5 (Friday): Very Likely Out of Town 🙁
July 6 (Saturday): Ditto that. 😛
July 12 (Friday): DnD
July 13 (Saturday): Living Greyhawk catchup at the house
Pity those of you who are so mired in this that more than 50% affects your schedule, but before you chuckle, let’s not forget the Oriental Adventures game 🙂

We ran the slot 0 for part of the RPGA Living Force Almas trilogy last night.
Because she’s a backup GM for the gameday and because the author of the modules was GMing the slot 0 for us, the only way for Jackie to ‘get’ the module was to play it.
This meant I FINALLY got her into a Star Wars game.
And she liked it. 🙂 She was 3 levels lower than the average at the table, but we put together a character who was really good at a few things that Jackie personally likes her characters to be good at — good enough to match the higher level characters.
Good enough to drop the main bad guy when the other ‘shooters’ couldn’t hit, and tough enough to survive a really REALLY nasty “throat crush” thing.
And she liked it. I lucked out and her first Star Wars game was fun. Very cool.

It stands for Total Party Kill.
I’ve never perpetrated such a thing on any of my tables.
Until Saturday.
Long story short: in a lighthouse, someone (okay, it was Rey) cast a wall of fire in a room containing six 250-gallon copper tuns full of lamp oil.
In the next room were sixty-five five gallon clay jars full of more oil.
I’d mentioned that they were passing through rooms full of buckets of sand, and that the sand was there to control fires, because of the risk involved in having all the lamp oil….
…then I mentioned the big copper casks. The fact that they were full of oil was not specifically stated, but no one at the table claimed that the clues hadn’t been there. Mostly, there was a lot of rueful head-shaking.
It was a playtest, so it didn’t ‘count’, but it was still sort of fun.
Me: “You take… as near as I can figure… you take about 500d6 fire, plus the same amount of explosion damage.”
Them: “Wow.”
Me: “Then the lighthouse falls on you.”
~Another funny bit.~
Me: So… four months later, you wake up in the nearby village…
Rey: …where we’ve just landed.

Putting it mildly, my review of Legend of the Five Rings Magic of Rokugan (for d20) was well-received by the staff. I’ll post up a link when they publish it to the site.
I enjoyed doing the review quite a bit (would have liked more time, but the situation demanded a quick turn around), and I hope I get a chance to do some work with that site in the future.
Update
That was fast: You can see the review here (although they stripped the formatting… c’est la vie).

Not many. I’m writing a review for an online Gamer Magazine, on a d20 sourcebook. I’ll link to that that when it’s up.
I purchased Spycraft for d20, which I hope to incorporate some ideas from into the Living Pulp endeavor. Star Wars this weekend, and I believe I owe this site an update on what’s happened in the last few sessions, so expect those soon. (Yay, something else I need to do.)

Ghosts, Demons and Spirits in Japanese Lore on Asianart.com

Tales of Virtue and Treachery — A bunch of fiction from Rokugan, for whoever’s interested.

– Oriental Adventures
– Farscape RPG (or even frigging info on when it comes out)
– Tome and Blood sourcebook
– Silence and Song sourcebook
All of the WEG modules converted to d20.