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.