Category Archives: DnD

Does this look too complicated?

The Riddle of Steeel, a fantasy roleplaying game published by the apparently-defunct Driftwood Studios, has a highly interesting combat system. Unlike many other systems, all attacks are called shots (you’re not just trying to stab somebody, you’re trying to stab him in the face or arm or somewhere), there are no hit points to speak of, attacks are actively defended against (you have no static defensive values, but you can try to block, parry, etc.)

After perusing some examples of play and looking through the rulebook, it seems to me that this system suffers from looking more convoluted on paper than it is in actual play. The following is the basic flow of how a fight goes between two parties:

a. Check for Surprise & Hesitation

Check Reflex (TN see below), failure indicates that no action can be taken until next round – proceed to step 1. Succeed and defend as normal – proceed to step b.

  • TN 5: Purposely standing with no stance, inviting attack
  • TN 7: Aware of opponent, but victim of a cheap shot; or hesitation
  • TN 10: Unsuspecting or inattentive
  • TN 13: Blindsided!

b. Declare Stance

At start of bout, or after a pause, declare stance out loud.

  • Aggressive Stance: +2 CP when attacking; -2 CP when defending
  • Defensive Stance: +2 CP when defending; -2 CP when attacking
  • Neutral Stance: offers flexibility and no modifiers

c. Initiative – Establish Aggressor and Defender

Take a red and white die into your hands. The GM calls “throw,” and each combatant drops one of the dice on the table.

  • Red: indicates aggression
  • White: indicates defense
  • Red/Red: a tie-breaker is required
    • Both parties roll Reflex against their own ATN, apply Weapon Length penalties as normal.
    • In the case of a tie, compare actual Reflex scores. Thrusts provide a +1 Reflex modifier over swings and bashes.
    • If this is still a tie then the blows are simultaneous!
  • White/White: The combatants circle each other, repeat the initiative process, return to start of step a.

1. Start of the Combat Round – Blood Loss Check

Successfully roll EN/BL or lose one point of HT.

  • HT 1: all dice pools are halved
  • HT 0: character unconscious and dying

2. Call out the Number of the Round – Fatigue

  • -1 CP per 2xEN rounds of fighting. This number is further reduced by the total CP penalty for armor, shield, and encumbrance.

3. Dice Pool Refresh

  • All dice pools fills or refreshes, remember to deduct spillover Shock, unless Pain is greater. Pain is deducted from all dice pools.

4. First Half of the Exchange of Blows

  • Aggressor declares attack: state maneuver, CP spent, and target zone; 1-7 for swings, 8-14 for thrusts. Remember Stance (1st blow only) and Reach modifiers.
  • Defender declares defense or attack: state maneuver, including CP.
  • Weapon Reach: -1 CP per step to attack an opponent with longer reach, until the shorter weapon makes a damaging strike. When the longer weapon is in too close, the penalty applies to both defense and offense, until a damaging blow is scored.

5. Resolve Damage and/or Determine New Attitude

  • (MOS + DR) – (Opponent’s TO + AV) = Wound Level
  • If the attacker’s MOS >=0 he stays the aggressor, keeping initiative
  • If the defender’s MOS 1+ he becomes the aggressor
  • Shock is immediately subtracted from all dice pools, active first then reserve, any spillover applies in step 3.

6. Second Half of the Exchange of Blows

See step 4. The roles may have reversed since the first exchange

7. Resolve Damage and/or Determine New Attitude

See step 5.

8. Repeat Until a Winner is Determined

Repeat steps 1 through 7 until the combat is over – one way or another.

*whew*. Take a quick look at the target zones and damage tables (separate for slashing, bludgeoning, and piercing) and this all looks like a bit of a brain-full. But a duel between two characters in this system will frequently be resolved after only two or three rounds, with a total of maybe six throws of the dice. By the end of the first round or halfway through the second, it is often abundantly clear who has the upper hand, and one or two more exchanges seals the deal.

*summary lifted from erdtman.com/story-games/
**some excellent examples of folks muddling through a few matches can be found archived at suptg

Building an Army through Aspects

My favorite trapping of the FATE roleplaying game system is “aspects,” descriptive traits that a person, object, organization, or whatever may have that can provide a mechanical benefit or hindrance when appropriate. This is an old idea, what with dozens of RPGs over the years having perks or flaws available during character creation, but with each being strictly beneficial or strictly counterproductive. Aspects could swing either way and depending on the circumstances a single aspect could swing either way. Temporary aspects could arise as consequences of various actions. They’re greatly versatile.

So when my D&D game went from railroad mode to sandbox mode (this was an explicit shift; I told them it was part of the campaign structure from the outset), the militia of the small town of Freehold needed to take root, to turn into a military power of some consequence. Since we were officially in a do-whatever-you-want phase of the story, I didn’t want to put any undue limits on how this was going to unfold, so I set aside the bulk of the 4th Edition D&D rules for an extended “skill challenge” built around the notion that the player characters would have the opportunity to boss around, assist, and train their town’s militia into something more suitable for a fledgling kingdom’s national security.

We started by each chipping in an aspect to describe the status quo of the militia. We’re not a bunch of indy-RPG pass-the-speaking-stick collaborative storytelling types as such, being firmly grounded in the tradition of strong-DM rule systems (where you ask the DM for facts about your character’s world instead of asserting facts into the setting). We got the following array of descriptors, which I think was accurate but pretty bland:

  • Redshirt
  • Cannon Fodder
  • Not in the face!
  • Better them than us
  • Survivor

A pretty sorry lot, all told. Clearly they were going to need some whipping into shape. Armed with a hex map of the area, a whiteboard with an open-bottomed table drawn onto it, and a cheap erasable calendar I picked up at the teacher’s supplies store, we set to work. The players could use their D&D skills to remove or add aspects to any number of militiamen, modifying their odds of success by spending additional time on their tasks. The default DC was 25 (these were 4th level characters, so we’re talking about pretty long odds), but I would reduce the DC by 2 for each additional day spent working on it, with a few other situational modifiers available. The players quickly set to work figuring out a strategy to minimize the risk of failing any of their die rolls, consistently aiming for extremely safe rolls.

To inject some degree of urgency, I planned on having an event happen at least once a month that would progressively indicate that something bigger than their militia could handle would come down on them if they didn’t hurry up a little.

After about two months, we ended up with the following twenty five-man militia teams:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
Cannon Fodder – – – – – – – – – ● – – – ● – – – – – –
Not in the face! – – ● – – – – – – ● – – ● ● – – – – – –
Better them than us ● ● ● ● ● – ● ● – ● – – ● ● ● ● ● ● – ●
Survivor ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
Disciplined Soldier ● ● ● ● ● ● ● – – – – – – – ● ● – ● – –
Blooded – – – – – – – ● – – – – – – ● ● ● ● – ●
Field Medic – – – – – – – ● – – – – – – – – – – – –
Arcane Apprentice – – – – – – – ● ● – – – – – ● – – – – –
Arcane Journeyman – – – – – – – – ● – – – – – – – – – – –
Dirty Tricks – – – – – – – – ● – ● ● – – ● ● ● ● – ●
Holy Warrior – – – – – ● – – – – – – – – – – – – ● –
Juggernaut – – – – – ● – – – – ● ● – – ● – – – ● –
Art of War – – – – – – – – ● – ● ● – – – – – – ● –

It quickly came out that “Redshirt” and “Cannon Fodder” were purely negative traits, and needed to be removed from pretty much the entire militia, that “Not in the face!” and “Better them than us” were a mixed bag, and that nobody wanted to lose the “Survivor” aspect. The player characters proceeded to pull teams of militiamen from patrol and watch duty to drum undesirable traits out and cultivate new desirable traits. The skill challenge aspect encouraged them to play to their strengths. Can you guess which groups received a lot of attention from the party Rogue? Or the Fighter with multiclassed Cleric? Or the Wizard?

I didn’t really know how this would turn out. Some possibilities that crossed my mind included that they would set some portion of the militia to work building fortifications or crafting new equipment for themselves. I suspected they would make diplomatic gestures towards a neighboring Halfling despot for some kind of mutual assurance pact or to hire mercenaries from there. Once my players got made up their mind to focus on whipping their cannon-fodder redshirts into shape, they stuck to it.

The good people of Freehold now have a spectrum of men-at-arms, united in an ethos of self-preservation. Half of them are characterized by excellent discipline, nearly half a well-versed in dirty tricks, and a handful have specialized roles that reflect certain facets of the party dynamic. These fighting men reflect their leadership, and for once I’ve got dozens of NPCs whose primary characteristics were far more the product of the players than of the DM. In a D&D game. How ’bout that?

Skill Challenges in Practice

Explosives as an option

I rather like the general idea of skill challenges; they encourage a DM to reward players for solving problems without resorting to combat. This encourages players to see each other’s characters outside their combat roles and fosters a more rich, varied, interesting, and thus entertaining play experience. The general idea is lovely, a welcome addition to Dungeons & Dragons.

In practice, skill challenges as presented in the rules are a mess. I’m not talking about the math of target difficulties. Whether you need to roll a 5 or a 15 to advance the challenge is immaterial. The problem is that poor rolling necessarily results in failure. The tactical combat system of Dungeons & Dragons when implemented as suggested in the rules assumes player victory. Take 600xp worth of bad-guys from the Monster Manual and throw them at five 2nd level adventurers and you will almost always see the adventurers succeed. Repeat this two more times without allowing the player characters to reset their daily abilities and healing surges, and things can get a little hairy but victory is still the most foreseeable outcome. Skill challenges as presented in the DMG and the errata introduce a significant chance of defeat without a mechanical means of building up player tension.

Some assumptions I work with when doing prep-work for a campaign:

  1. The characters will be advancing through levels during the course of the story.
  2. As characters advance in level, they become more competant.
  3. Players generally prefer to have their characters succeed overall.
  4. It is important that the characters be competant enough to have a reasonable chance at success.
  5. Success that comes too easily is rarely satisfactory.
  6. It is important that the characters not be so competant as to make success trivial.
  7. When preparing for play, some preparation for the players bypassing or failing in regards to certain xp-yielding challenges should be taken to address points 4 and 6.

If I am to incorporate one or two skill challenges per game session, each worth the experience points rewarded for a level-appropriate tactical engagement, I face the very real possibility of the players failing several encounters. If I pepper in skill challenges every second fight or so, the player characters will advance a level after six fights. That tends to take two to three game sessions for my group. Fail one of those skill challenges and the rhythm gets broken up. Instead of doing the character advancement busywork at the beginning or end of a session, maybe the XP threshhold is broken mid-session. No, thank you, but I still want to use skill challenges.

Does this mean I should force the players to succeed their skill checks? Oh Lord, no. When players roll badly they know it. Just as they expect their characters to be awesome when they roll a 20, they expect their characters to suck when they roll 1. Rather than stonewall on a skill failure (or series of failures), I add complications and require that everbody gets in on it.

Skill can be fun, too

“Everybody grab a d20, somebody give me a Nature check, somebody else give me a Perception check, everybody else give me either an Endurance or Athletics check.” The players pick who’s responsible for which end of things. If most of them succeed, a consequence is avoided. Consequences could involve the passage of an undue amount of time: you found a good route through the swamp, but Mr. Shinypants Paladin got stuck in the muck about a half-mile in.

If enough failures amass over multiple passes through the group (let everybody have a chance to roll at least a second time; people love a chance at redemption), they fail the skill challenge and are faced with an additional combat encounter to make up the XP gap and slap them on the wrist a little. After Mr. Shinypants Paladin got stuck in the muck, Mr. Smartypants Wizard picked the wrong path, and Ms. Stabbity Rogue didn’t notice the Gnoll ambush before it was too late. Oops.

Depending on the nature of the challenge, it may be more or less easy to come up with a narrative justification for this. How does haggling with a merchant over the price of apples result in fisticuffs in heroic fantasy? Pretty easily, really, but in many of those cases there’s really no reason to pick up dice in the first place or give an experience point reward for a success.