Motivational Monday

ToEE 4E Session 3 - The Dragon!

We begin in an inner chamber of the ruined moathouse with our quartet of heroes - Torgar - Dwarf Druid (and his bear companion Po), Apollo - Elf Bladesinger, Isaac - Human Swordmage, and Torin - Dragonborn Paladin. After fighting off the dire rats in the middle of the night, they sleep a little later than usual and wake up ready once again. Looking at their sketch map they realize that there can't be too many unexplored areas left and they resolve to thoroughly search the entire place - for both stragglers and loot.


Heading into the southern end near where they fought the giant snakes, they begin smashing down doors and tossing the interior. The old wooden doors give them quite a bit of trouble but they manage to overcome this. As they ransack the place they find no opposition - fortunate, given the amount of noise they are making - and discover a sword hidden behind a stout piece of furniture. The Bladesinger pronounces it magical, a Luck Blade, and claims it for himself as no one else uses a sword as their primary weapon.


Moving to the north end of the place they discover a set of stairs leading down but after some debate decide to finish clearing out the upper level before descending. They work through some otherwise empty rooms and halls, finding a few trinkets. They then break into an old kitchen, disturbing a nest of stirges and finding a whole mess of trouble.


The stirges swarm the Paladin and the Bladesinger who are in more exposed positions in the room. The Swordmage tries to help, but the Druid and his bear are hindered by the narrow doorway and the efforts of the others to fight off the attacking bloodsuckers. They prove to be tough opponents and by the time two stirges are killed the Paladin is also down!  He soon regathers his strength and rejoins the fight but it's a near thing. Eventually the Druid and the bear manage to get into positions to help and the situation turns around at that point. As the last stirge turns to buzz away the Bladesinger splatters it with his magical blade. The battered and bloodied party rests briefly, uses some healing magic, discovers a magical suit of acid-resistant hide armor (folded up on a butcher block for some forgotten reason) and resolves to push on to the last unopened door in the place.


The Paladin and the bear force open the large doors and walk into a room that is partially open to the sky.It is also apparently home to a small black dragon, who is reared up next to a battered wooden chest and asking in draconic just what the heck is going on? The Paladin replies diplomatically that they are exploring the ruin and tries to figure out if the party is in shape to take on this horse-sized wyrm. The Druid offers to trade magical items with the dragon but the dragon interprets this as an offer of tribute, which he accepts - "leave the item on the floor and back out of the room and you may live".  There's nor way our heroes are going to agree to this and so now a fight breaks out.


The Paladin and the Swordmage charge the dragon while the Bladesinger stands his ground and launches his spells. As the two warriors run up the dragon lets fly with his acid breath, catching every member of the party but the druid, wounding everyone and killing Po. Dripping and smoking, the team responds and tears into the dragon with sword and spell. The Druid pauses to restore his friend to life but is now exposed and when the wounded dragon sprays his acid again he blasts the entire party, dropping the Paladin - and the bear! Enraged, the heroes send even more violence against the dragon with the Bladesinger stepping back to get out of blast range and the Druid, somewhat protected from the acid breath by his new acid-resistant hide armor, moves into a better position to fight the beast up close. Once again the beast spews forth liquid smoking death, severely wounding the Swordmage this time and killing the Paladin! The Druid strikes hard and the Bladesinger blasts away with magic missiles, staggering the dragon. It tears into the Druid with its formidable claws, but the newly-returned Po flies into a rage at the sight of this thing hurting his friend and rips the thing apart in response, ending the danger and the carnage in a furious assault.

Battered and with one member down for good, the heroes rest briefly, gather up their loot, and stagger back to Hommlet for the night, bringing word of the bandits' (and a dragon's) demise.


DM Notes: This was a nice little run that got our temple game moving again after a longer than expected break. I figured they could clear the upper level of the Moathouse in one more session and they did so thoroughly.



As they went to start smashing in doors they discovered that they are a pretty low strength party, making those Strength checks to break down doors a lot tougher than usual. The bear was recruited to be the primary battering ram as his Strength of 20 is the highest in the group by far. Once inside I use a combination of Perception rolls and common sense (if you look inside a drawer you can see what's in the drawer, no roll necessary) and had a little fun with them as they insisted there had to be something in one of the rooms because they rolled really high:

DM: "OK you think there must be something in this room"

Blaster: "Can I assist?"


DM: "Sure"


Red: "28 with the assist"


DM: "You don't find anything yet but it must be here somewhere"


Repeat until frustrated Apprentices finally catch on that they are chasing their tails here and move on.


They seriously debated going downstairs - "Because there's more stuff and more XP's down there" - and then decided to make sure the upper floor was empty first so they wouldn't get ambushed. I think that's sound reasoning in general, not just in D&D.



The Stirge fight was much tougher than I expected. These are, again, out of the Monster Vault and are pretty nasty mechanically but they are also fun to run. They have a fairly normal attack but once they hit they attach and do ongoing 5 damage at that point, untyped. So if two of them latch on, that's 10 points per round coming out of your adventurer and that's a lot. Their AC and Reflex Defense also go up when they attach so it makes them that much harder to hit. Now it's only a move action to try and break loose (it's considered a grab when they plug in) but it's a tricky thing in a tight space and these aren't minions, so they don't drop in one hit. It's considered to be a level two encounter but my level one party had a tough time with it and took nine rounds to end it.



I think the dragon surprised them, especially since Apprentice Red had just made a comment after finding the stairs that "We have a dungeon, now we just need a dragon".  I want to give them some credit here too - they did try to talk to it first! It didn't go the way they hoped but they did try. My idea here was that this was a very young dragon wounded and on its own. It holed up here in the moathouse to recover and gathered up some treasure in an old chest that it might be able to carry off when it decided to move on. This was not a part of the original ToEE but I added it because a) I wanted another "big" monster and the giant lizard in the original made me think "dragon" and b) I think dragons should show up more than they do in a lot of published adventures, old and new. One of the best moments in my 3E RttToEE campaign was when my extremely confident players walked into the Moathouse courtyard. Some of them  had played or run the original ToEE and were thinking it would still be a "starter area". When the blue dragon appeared the look on their faces was priceless, as was their reaction in trying to deal with a sudden major threat in an area where they had been expecting quiet. When you have cool iconic monsters in the game you should USE THEM! So I did. I killed the bear twice and the paladin once, thanks to two good recharge rolls and the bloodied breath ability. Firing off the breath that many times and hitting that many characters may be a personal record, especially considering it only lasted three rounds! Stat-wise I used a tweaked "Fledgling White Dragon" from the Monster Vault which is a Level 1 Solo.



Mechanically, the main thing that I learned here is that I need to watch levels more closely now. Having only a 4 character party combined with using the powered-up monster stats from the MV means that my guys are taking more of a beating than the older low-level runs did. Monster damage is significantly higher now, and having no striker types means that fights last longer. The Sentinel Druid is a decent healer but two defenders and an easily hit bear mean there is a lot of damage to heal. In my main campaign they were taking on encounters 3 and 4 levels higher just to give some teeth to the monsters. I'm thinking I need to adjust things back to truly reflect a 4-man party or I need to keep the levels down, possibly both. They ended with enough XP to level up to 2nd and Apprentice Blaster was pondering whether to bring back his Paladin or make a new character. They both retreated to the character builder right after and were checking their options for next time.



Beyond the mechanics I learned that the Apprentices instincts are right on and they are having the same kinds of conversations we used to have back when we were playing B/X D&D and AD&D. I choose to see that as confirmation that I'm doing something right. It also tells me that despite all the changes in things over the last 30 years that some things are just fun - army men, BB guns, firecrackers, and looting and mayhem with D&D.

Looking Forward to 2012

Today I'm thinking about next year, and unlike yesterday's more general post this one is more personal. What do I want to change or accomplish next year on the gaming front?  Well what did I do this year?

In 2011 I worked on creating a more balanced gaming diet, introducing the Apprentices to more board and card games like Munchkin, Memoir 44, and Command and Colors Ancients. It is, however, the year I let Warhammer 40,000 mostly die. Part of it is competition for time, part of it is that it's really built around 2 sides and with 3 interested parties that's tricky to pull off, and part of it is expense. Maintaining multiple armies for multiple people is a strain, even with my economic upturn. When a single unit for the game is as much as a core rulebook for an RPG I can get a lot more hours of fun out of the RPG book in the short term.

RPG-wise we expanded their horizons to include Supers via M&M, ICONS, and Marvel. We went into space with Star Wars d6 and Star Wars Saga. We are trying on some boots and saddles with our foray into Deadlands. So it was a good year. Blaster and Red are my main two gamers and they have been armed with PHB's for every edition of D&D along with books for a few other games too. I don't think the OSR is big amongst the high school and junior high crowd just now but if some local 16 year old decides he wants to break out a Greyhawk Wars campaign then my two are ready for it!

What about next year?


Well my main 4E campaign came to an end so I will probably move to fill that gap. I'm tempted to go back, pick up, and finish my Neccessary Evil campaign just for a change of pace. I'm also tempted to run a Mutants and Masterminds game both for a change of pace and just because I think it would be fun. Somehow though, I suspect I will be back running 4th Edition before the year runs out and I'm fine with that - D&D has always been our "trunk" game, with other games branching out from it. Nowadays I seem to only have the bandwidth to run one regular (sorta weekly) full-length grown up game, and Lady Blacksteel and my other regulars seem to prefer that schedule too. In the past the desire for more variety has spurred me to try alternating sessions between two games and it works some of the time, but it can cause a loss of focus and some "what did we do last time?" moments each session. Have to ponder that one.

With the Apprentices we have ongoing campaigns of D&D 4E, ICONS, and some irregular games of Basic D&D, Star Wars, Marvel, and now Deadlands. That will probably continue. The other RPG's I'm sort of interested in introducing are Champions, Gamma World, Traveller, Shadowrun, and Star Trek. I realize "only" may be a mischaracterization there but they are still so new to this thing that I want to expose them to a wide variety of games and then play more of what they like. I once half-jokingly proposed to my gaming group that was suffering from a serious case of short gaming attention spans that we just go ahead and plan to play a new game each month: assuming we could meet 3 times in a month, session 1 would be character generation and the kickoff, session two would be the meat of an adventure, then session three would be the finale and a discussion about the game. The next month we would do it all again with a new game. It was funny then, but I'm seriously considering it now for 2012 to help me better manage the Apprentice games. If we can keep the main 4E Temple of Elemental Evil going at least once a month too, then I think this would be a really good "World Tour of RPG's"  because I could work in a few more besides - GURPS and Warhammer FRP and some others. Hmmm.

Besides RPG's I want to continue the boardgames and I will probably work in Settlers of Catan and some more light wargames like Combat Commander. I also want to work in some other miniatures games (I have a lot mini's, many of them gathering dust) like Federation Commander, Battletech, B5 Call to Arms, Song of Blades and Heroes, and Giant Monster Rampage. I had some homebrewed car combat rules and giant monster rules of my own a few years back so I might even dust those off if the time opens up. I'm not sure how 40K fits into this anymore as while I love the universe and have nearly 25 years of stuff for it I don't like the cost and the overhead of painting and storage and keeping up with the rules so much anymore. It's probably going to be a "when I really really feel like it" and not according to any kind of plan.

On their own the boys have made some attempts to start their own D&D games with friends but it has not been easy. All of them have complicated schedules and homework and there is still a huge "nerdy" stigma attached to it even in this age of Warcraft and Skyrim. They also have been playing some Heroquest (the old MB boardgame) and Risk and Stratego so that's been fun to watch too.

Beyond this we do some Xbox time together and play City of Heroes regularly too so we don't lack for options with our fun time - the trick is juggling kid schedules and work schedules and doing all of those normal family things while still making time for these. I've found that if we don't schedule it ahead of time, like any other gaming session, that it tends to get eaten up by other things and bumped by last minute changes of plan. I did a lot of that this year so I intend to change it for next year so no one ends their weekend disappointed.

I'm sure some new things will emerge that will change all of these plans at some point, but for now these are my goals. Whenever I do set up a new main game you can rest assured it will be chronicled here, warts and all. If I do go with the "Game of the Month"  plan - and that idea is really growing on me as I write this - then I will certainly document that here as well.

Pondering the Hobby - 2011

I try to stay plugged in to what's new in the hobby. That mostly comes from online sources of course but occasionally something new sneaks up on me in the local game store. One thing I've noticed this year is that there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of  NEW out there. This year's Gen Con is the first one in a long time that seemed to have almost nothing new being announced. I mean both new games outright and supplements for existing games apart from adventures. - things that players and DM's get excited about and generate some chatter and some interest. Some of this is probably my fault.


With all of the edition turnover and balkanization - the end of the d20 boom for example -  a lot of companies have gone off and done their own thing. For me Green Ronin, Sword and Sorcery, Kenzer, Malhovic, and Goodman Games were big players in the days of 3rd Edition D&D. Green Ronin is still on my list for M&M but they went off and did Dragon Age which holds little interest for me and have a few other things that are mostly outside of my interests as well, and they do nothing for 4E now. S&S is just flat out gone. Kenzer has Aces & Eights and Hackmaster which interest me a bit but not enough to keep up with them constantly and they make nothing for the games I play now. Malhovic pretty much went on hiatus with the launch of 4E. Goodman tried and gave up on continuing their 3E business model with 4E and has their own fantasy RPG coming out now. So these companies that were getting a lot of my money over the last 11 years stopped getting most of it over the last two.

Insert Fistful of Dollars reference here

This is not entirely their fault - a lot of it is tied to badly handled licensing arrangements by WOTC. Rather than the glory days of 3E where a whole bunch of the industry was devoted to supporting one game system - yes it was chaos but it was a glorious chaos - 4E has sort of gone off into it's own fortress and shut the gates, keeping everyone out. Sure, you can come in, but you're going to have to pay rent to stay and they can kick you out at any time. Most of these companies didn't choose to leave - they were told to! Pathfinder has tried to capture the 3E glory and has succeeded to a degree, but not on a scale like what we were seeing before. If you like more-retro-than-that there is all manner of old school goodness available at costs ranging from free to not free. There is Hackmaster. There is Goodman's thing with the d5's. There is Dragon Age. There is GURPS, Hero, and Savage Worlds. There is Warhammer FRP. There's probably some version of the Palladium FRPG in print right now too. Diversity is good, having options is good, but I can't personally contribute to all of them - and those are just typical fantasy RPG's! So I think a lot of us "choose sides" and try to focus on one or a few games. For a few shining years we really didn't have too - we could get the output of a lot of good people and it was all intended to work together. That's no longer the case.

Glorious Chaos - Kor agrees. And wants his new game.

Sure I could just pick them all up - at different points in my life I've pretty much done that. Not anymore - I'm trying to actually run these things, so the priority goes to new stuff for games I am running, or might run in the near future, or have run and liked enough to maybe run again. In a way, keeping up with a game system is like starting a relationship. I have to buy the main rules, check out supplements and adventures, stay in touch with the forums and the website to see whats going on. I don't really have time to sustain that kind of effort for more than a few systems, so if I'm not running it then these days I probably won't even bother taking a look at it other than a review somewhere. It's not so much the expense of buying one rulebook - it's the overhead of keeping up with the game. That's time I could spend working up material for my campaign, running my campaign, or trying to see what people are doing in the forums for a game I already have, like, and run! In the pre-internet days we had less to keep up with, and the "news updates" only came about once a month in the form of a magazine or a new book showing up at the store. Now a popular game with an active fanbase can generate a ton of material and be found in a dozen forums and blogs and fan sites. It's not a bad thing in and of itself but it does mean that there is just more "there" out there for any game nowadays*.


I used to buy main rulebooks for some games just because they looked interesting, I liked the subject, and if someone decided to run a game of it I would know enough to join in and play.** As it turns out, there are a lot more players than DM's and so what got played was largely determined by what myself and the other DM in the group felt like running. On those rare occasions someone else stepped up to run a game, it was usually a game we had already played because that's what they knew! The outcome is a lot of shelves of books that got read (or more often skimmed) and then set aside, never to see real action***


So yeah, some new games that are undoubtedly cool go uninspected by me. Some join the rotation. It feels like there just isn't a whole lot of new out there this year. Last year saw Dragon Age, M&M 3/DCA, Gamma World, a bunch of D&D Essentials stuff, Deathwatch, ICONS, the Dr. Who RPG (maybe that was technically 2009 but it was the end of 2009 so it's pretty close). This year we have that new Middle Earth thing and ... what? Looking at RPGnet for reviews of games published in 2011 and there's not much RPG there. It's a little bit of a conundrum - I don't really have a ton of free bandwidth to go diving into a new game but it bothers me when I see that hardly anything has come out this year. In many previous years I felt like there was more coming out than I could keep up with - now I feel like there's not much coming out that's worth keeping up with and I'm not all that picky about these things.

Now it's not like I'm going to run out of games to play - I think most of us are well-supplied in that area and could probably make one up on the fly if pressed. It just seems like this is a low point for new game releases or development. I hope so.  The last few years haven't exactly been prolific either - if you take away 4E and Pathfinder I didn't see a whole lot of new books on shelves in 2008 - 2009 - 2010 either. In 2007 we had Star Wars Saga edition, Hollow Earth Expedition, Savage World's Explorer Edition, Aces & Eights, Battlestar Galactica, Dread (not my thing but hey), Reign, and Scion. That's a pretty varied group. After that it narrows considerably with Traveller and the 40K universe games being a notable bright spot.

So what's my point? Well, at this time every year I can usually think of at least one game that came out that I don't have that I wish I had picked up. I don't feel that way this year. Now there are some supplements that I'd like to catch up on, but no new games. Since my personal economic downturn ended earlier this year you might think there would be some pent-up demand for some things I missed while things were tight - there really aren't any. I've managed to pick up the few games I really wanted and managed to mostly keep up with the 4E product train when it was humming. For the things I am running though, I don't really feel an urge to grab a bunch of stuff - I have plenty of material and there's nothing else out there that I see as a must have. I still like to play, and I still like to see new stuff, and lord knows I have plenty of room to comment on things, so I don't think it's a tremendous attitude change on my part, I think that there is less stuff out there.

Is it an economic downturn thing? I'm not sure. Is it the fracturing of D&D into 4E/PF/OSR? Maybe. Is it the growing "New Model" approach of publishing primarily PDF's that some companies use, leaving the physical books to print on demand services? I could see that. With bookstores and game stores taking a beating I wonder if physical books will become a luxury version of an RPG, an optional upgrade kind of like the special leather cover limited editions we saw a few years ago, while most will "get by" with pdf versions of the rules. I was thinking that this trend along with the end of the d20 license as "the" system that we would see an explosion of creative new games published like a small press game of years ago, mostly living online and growing in scattered small pockets where a DM manages to talk some players into trying something new. I'm not seeing that to the degree I thought we would, but I do see it happening. I do like my books, but if things go that way I think that I can live with it.

I'm still a little surprised though - where's the new Star Wars game (it is on TV right now)? Where's the new Trek game (there was a movie in 2009, and presumably will be another)? Aren't we due for a new edition of Shadowrun about now (4th came out in 2004 - The previous record was 6 years!) ? How about some kind of competitor for Vampire -  we're 4 movies into Twilight and 4 seasons into True Blood and we only have the original game as any kind of big player here? I know we're neck deep in fantasy RPG's and about hip deep in superhero RPG's (look at the movies and TV shows over the last 11 years to see why) and that's fine but there are other things that are popular right now that might spur some interest in an RPG. C'mon people! I'm not the guy to do this - I've been playing too long to see vampires as anything other than experience points waiting to be collected - but surely there's someone out there, maybe even a female game designer, that could pull a nice mechamically light supernatural romance game together. Or else let Cinematic Unisystem take it - they managed to turn Smallville into something resembling an RPG. Heck, over the last 10 years we've also had the Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire, Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy, and some other shows about criminal lives - why isn't there a non-supernatural dark side of life game out there somewhere? I wouldn't expect to see it from WOTC, but I would expect to see it on RPGNow. 

Twilght: The Hunter

I've probably rambled on enough now, but this has all been on my mind as I start to look back at 2011. It's been a definite upswing for me personally, but "this thing of ours" doesn't seem to be doing terribly well on the whole. I hope it's temporary or at most a transition to a new method of doing business. In 2021 I expect I will be playing some of the games I enjoy now but I am not sure I will be acquiring/updating or supporting them.  I suppose I'm just trying to stay on the lookout for The Coming Thing.****

*Except for Rifts - nobody is allowed to talk about Rifts on the internet. Thank you Palladium Games.



**This was the source of my Law of Gaming Depreciation: The value of a main rulebook to any game declines over time. Not financially - mechanically. This is because traditionally a Big Book is 100% of the game for a few months and then a supplement comes out. Probably one about guns (modern/sci-fi mainly) that adds a bunch of equipment and possibly new combat rules. Then the main rulebook is 90% of the rules. Then there's one about Elves that adds some new stuff to character generation and the main rulebook is 80% of the rules. So a year or so into the life of a new edition you're Big Rulebook is still mostly useful. By about the end of year two though, bringing only that book to the table will get you sneered at by regular players as they are forced to share their stack of splatbooks to help you get your character up to par. If you need examples I suggest Rifts, Shadowrun, and every edition of D&D since 2nd. GURPS was pretty good about avoiding this, Hero too, and Savage Worlds is too. I'm sure there are conclusions to be drawn there but I'll leave that to another day.



***unless they were pulled out to argue with someone on the internet. Even I get bored sometimes.



 **** and for both of you who get that reference *hat tip* and we should play something sometime

Motivational Monday

Some Math for Icons and Savage Worlds

ICONS has some pretty simple math. Abilities are rated from 1-10 and players roll 1d6 - 1d6 then add the result to the relevant ability to beat the target number which is typically an opponent's ability score. Since the roll tends to give a result of zero you can pretty reliably predict whether or not the characters will be able to succeed at a given task. There are things that can modify the target (darkness, etc.)  There are also ways to gain bonuses to rolls. There is some motivation to do these things as exceeding the target by 3 is a special success and by 5 is a major success and can yield some additional benefits beyond "you did it".


Character creation uses a table that limits character stats to a 1-8 range weighted towards 4, 5, or 6. A straight 3d4-2 roll would accomplish a similar effect while leaving the slight possibility of a 9 or 10 stat out there if someone wanted to go that route. As it is the "global" average lines up very well with the "global" target number. If you want to make things harder, give your villains higher stats and lower stats will make things easier. The good thing here is that assuming the human average is a 3 means that heroes averaging a 5 will clean up against them easily, as they should. Bumping "quality" thugs up to a 4 and "Elites" up to a 5 for their main stats should provide a noticeable bump in difficulty without being overwhelming - that comes in with the 8's, 9's, and 10's.


As with most things ICONS, the simplicity of the mechanics conceals the elegance of the design - the math works really well. ICONS tends to not be a very crunch heavy game anyway so this approach fits perfectly.

Savage Worlds has a little more crunch to it. The base target number is always 4, with 8 being a "raise" and each subsequent jump of 4 equals another raise. There are modifers to different tasks that can change this but let's use 4 as a baseline.


1d4 = 25% chance of success (which will then explode and give a chance of a raise at 6% - that's a 4 plus another 4)

1d6 = 50% chance of success (exploding for a raise happens 14.9% of the time - that's a 6 plus a 2+ on the next roll)

1d8 = 62.5% chance of success and the possibility of a raise on the initial die roll (12.5%)

1d10 = 70% chance of success (Raise is now at 30%)

1d12 = 75% chance of success (Raise is now at 41.7%)


Ratings can go above a d12. The next step is d12 +1, then d12 +2, etc.


1d12+1 = 83% chance of success (Raise = 50%)

1d12+2 = 91.6% chance of success (Raise = 58%)

1d12+3= 100% chance of success (Raise = 66.7%)


Further increases are really just upping your chance of a raise, which hits 100% at +7


There is also the Wild Die, which is an extra d6 that all PC's and important NPC's get to roll alongside their normal die type. The higher of the two applies. This is a "PC's are Special" type rule that ups the chance of success somewhat (especially noticeable if you're rolling d4's and d6's otherwise) but since it applies to all player characters equally then I think we can ignore it for now.


So...are there sweet spots in the Savage Worlds system?  Well there is that weird kink in the curve for raises on a d6 where it's slightly better than the chance of a raise on a d8. For normal successes though, a d6 is twice as good as a d4 and the rate of change drops at each incremental increase after that.Clearly the jump from a d4 to a d6 is the most bang for the buck, especially considering that base attributes start as d4's and have to be raised beyond that. Based on this I suspect that it's better to raise all five attributes to d6's than it is to have 2 d8's, a d6, and 2 d4's but only if you have an intentionally broad character! If you intend to specialize in certain skills tied to one attribute then I think the d10 level is pretty effective as it pushes your base success chance up over 2/3 and it doubles your chances of a raise over the d8 level. Plus you would have 2 points left to raise other stats to a d6 - no sense in sucking at everything else if you can avoid it.  Adding +1's to a d12 roll seems very inefficient but at higher experience levels that may be your only option.


Let's look at it in the context of combat. The target in melee is Parry, which is 2 + half of Fighting. Damage is compared to Toughness, which is 2+ half of Vigor. Meeting or beating these is a success, beating by 4 is a raise, and each additional increment of 4 is another raise.


Average human stats are d6's so assuming getting in a fight have a d6 in Fighting then most people's average Parry & Toughness = 5. Effectively what this does is shift everyone down one notch on the chart, roughly. Due to the way exploding dice work, certain target numbers do not change the odds. If you're rolling a d4, the odds of rolling a 5 are the same as rolling a 4 (d4 + d4). For d6's a 7 is as likely as a 6, for d8's a 9 is as common as an 8, etc. It does impact the Wild Die so there is an effect overall even for the d4 roller, but the base odds on your "main" die don't change.


You could go d12 in Strength, d6 in Vigor, then d4's in Smarts, Spirit, and Agility.  Given the presence of the d6 Wild Die you actually still have pretty decent capabilities with your other stats and be pretty nasty in hand to hand combat.


So the baseline for Savage Worlds - the d6 - will succeed about half of the time on a normal test. That's a pretty solid base but could be unsatisfying in play because it also means that the average character fails at the average task half the time too. The Wild Die bumps the success chance up to 75% in this case which makes for a much more satisfying game for the players without breaking the universe for everyone else. As skill (die types) increases this has less and less impact, so it nicely expands the "middle ground" for the system and then takes a lower profile as things ramp up. I think it's a very well-done mechanic.


There are of course various edges that can affect certain kinds of rolls and hindrances that will let one buy stats up another point or two but those are not universally available. Also, even with a little more crunch than ICONS, I'm not sure that SW is worth much agonizing over the math. Higher dice = better chance of success in every case (even if raises have that one kink) so most of the time the higher die type should win, though SW's other cinematic mechanics (Wild Die, Bennies) can be used to overcome this.

Anyway there's my math homework for the week. I do like the d20 systems out there but they are kind of plain probability-wise as everything is so simple: +/-1 = +/-5% chance of success, regardless. Efficient but boring math-wise!  Thank goodness for the multitude of choices out there that still try out other approaches and let us flex our brains in slightly different ways from time to time! Each individual approach may not be better than a particular standard but having options is always preferable to a boring uniformity.


Some other time (some other website if you care about it right now): GURPS, Hero, and those dice pool games.

Varying the Approach

One thing that's been pretty consistent over the years in my gaming circles is the way we run things. It's pretty much people sitting around a table, screened DM at one end, battlemat & markers & dice & character sheets around the edges. The number of people and the size of the table varies, but this has been the Way It Is Done for me and the people I have played with since the early 80's. I've run every edition of D&D this way as well as Hero, Gurps, Traveller, and all the others. I'm of the opinion that the reason for this is because it works!

That looks about right

However, I try to stay open minded about how I do things like this. During one of my 3rd edition campaigns I was a little tired of toting the 8 X 4 table in and out of my living room so I decided to play without a giant table. It felt weird to not have a big table and a battlemat with everyone around it but having the players scattered around the living room made for a more casual atmosphere. I did this several times, mainly when I knew it would not be a combat-intensive session, and it seemed like the players did get into the non-mechanical aspects of the game more than was typical. I probably would not do it if the evening was going to feature an assault on a dragon's lair but if it's the lord mayor's summer masquerade ball I might do it just to change things up.


I also typically have everything I am running printed out and on the table or behind my screen - mostly because that's how I've always done it. In my main 4E game some of my players started bringing their characters on tablets and smartphones and it kind of surprised me. I suppose it's a logical continuation of the character building tool - build it on the computer, export it to some device you carry aaround all the time anyway. At first I was opposed to it but I realized there really wasn't much reason to rule it out as long as I can see it on demand. So I let it go and we had zero problems with it.  Heck, with a dice rolling program you can be game-ready without carrying anything extra! Even the rules are available online, so if you want to go totally electronic it is an option now, at least for D&D 3E & 4E (and probably others as well). The no-dice thing is still a little weird though. We all have a ton of dice - stash a backup dice bag in the glovebox!

I like this better than the spreadsheet approach but I think they outsmarted themselves on the d4's

Technology side note: Remember when printing out character sheets was a challenge? We used to go up to the library and pay a nickel or a dime per copy to get our blank sheets and we tended to be a little stingy with them because there was some effort involved in replacing them. That was the age when purchasing pre-printed sheets was a big deal - some of them even came in colors other than white! I remember writing programs in BASIC to print D&D sheets on my old dot-matrix printer but they were never as good as the pre-printed ones. Also, games that came with a pad of character sheets were just awesomely cool as well - James Bond 007 and one of the Lords of Creation adventure modules came with these.  I think one of the forgotten bonuses of the age of the internet and the cheap inkjet printer was freeing us from the tyranny of the copy machine! Even after that some games still put out packaged sheets. One of the supplements for Underground came with a pack of character sheets (and kill stickers!). Warhammer Fantasy Role Playing 2E had a supplement pack that included a pad of sheets too. Kinda retro but I still bought them.

Yep, that was it

The last few years I have picked up quite a few smaller games and supllements as PDF's. I used to always print them out if I intended to actually use them in play, otherwise they were just for reference.  When I decided to run ICONS I realized everything I had was electronic and I was low on printer ink. Not wanting to waste time and ink printing a 100+ page rulebook AND a 30 or so page adventure I decided to run completely electronic, something I had never done. To be really radical, I didn't get out the mini's, or the battlemat, or the table either. This was 3 Apprentices and myself sitting around the living room with no books. They had their dice, pencils, and character sheets and I had a laptop and my notebook and a pen. It went amazingly well! The change in approach from my usual table setup really emphasized that this was something different and they went with it - no complaining about the lack of maps or anything else. Now ICONS does cater to this approach by not being the kind of game that demands a grid - it's not that detailed of a tactical exercise - and it doesn't even have the DM roll dice. It was the perfect opportunity to change things up and I was very satisfied with the result.

I do not own this, and I am comfortable saying that.

I know those of you playing online are likely unimpressed with these revelations but these are big changes for me. Now I would not do the mapless thing with a Hero system game, 3E or 4E D&D, or probably even Savage Worlds as those games benefit from a richer tactical experience. I might give it a try with our Basic D&D game though as an experiment. The all-electronic thing I would probably be willing to try with about any game, and some of those more detailed RPG's might benefit from it even more! I'm not that interested in game-running programs but for keeping multiple books in an easier package I am a little bit interested. The only problem is that I have a LOT of books for these things, so it's likely to only happen for newer games. - and games not behind a paywall that charges per month.

Deadlands crawls into the light

The other game we played over the holiday was Deadlands, specifically the Savage Worlds version. I got interested in Original Recipie Deadlands back in the 90's and have a just-about-complete collection of it and the nuclear version as well. I got interested in Savage Worlds back when it was just a discussion on a mailing list in the early 2000's and own quite a bit of material for it. That said it was a looong time before I got to run either one. I've mainly run Neccessary Evil in Savage Worlds (a Supers campaign) so I was very pleased to have the chance to run Deadlands in it. Finally!


Apprentice Who isn't as excited about cowboys as he is about Star Wars or Superheroes so he decided to take a pregenerated character I downloaded from the Pinnacle site and scurried off to play some Xbox while Red and Blaster made their own characters - even at this stage of their gaming careers they absolutely hate running characters that they did not create. That said Who did pick a winner. He was seriously considering the Guy With the Lightning Gun but ended up going with the Guy With the Gatling Shotgun. It's hard to go wrong with a gatling shotgun.


Apprentice Blaster was flipping through one of the older books and decided a Texas Ranger looked pretty cool and so went with that as his concept. He's big, tough, strong, and not too bright, but he's good with a rifle and in a fight so he was happy. No, we don't have a name yet.

Apprentice Red was instantly hooked on the Huckster concept. He's pretty smart but not much good in a hand to hand fight. Fortunately his magical abilities mean he doesn't need to  be up close to hurt people. His card tricks allow him to attack a single target at range, cause an explosion, and protect himself. Again, no name yet.

After all this character building time was growing short so I told them they were at a small town in Missourri waiting on a train headed for Denver. They had arrived separately but realized they were headed for the same destination and so spent several hours getting acquanted in a local saloon. Now it was nearing sundown and they decided to take a shortcut through a wooded area to the train station.


As they move through the brush, wolf howls break out and soon enough six wolves move into sight. The two men stop to see what the wolves are about. The pack catches the scent and charges in. Cards are dealt out and combat begins!


Blaster's Ranger puts a rifle round into one of the lead wolves and drops it in one shot. Red's Huckster tries to blast one of them but is off just a little bit. The Ranger drops one more with a shot from his rifle. Then the card-slinger drops a perfectly placed blast on top of the main pack and blows 3 of the wolves away in a storm of burning cards. One wolf manages to run up on the huckster and gets his jaws on one arm but the Ranger blows it away at point blank range. The two then hustle on towards the train station, arriving in time to catch the ride to their next adventure.


I do like the SW initiative system - using the the cards just feels so different that it breaks the typical D&D mindset and puts us in a different place. It worked well enough with superheroes but it feels even more "right" with western heroes. Switching initiative every round was something the Apprentices were also unused too, as most of our games use a more static system.

Combat moves fast, very fast, and I was once again elated to play with the awesomeness that is No Record Keeping - Basic NPC's and monsters are either Up and Fine, Shaken,  or Dead, sort of like minions in 4E D&D. Special characters (called WIld Cards) can have up to 3 wounds but these are marked with poker chips instead of being tracked by hit points or on a chart. I use white chips for Shaken, red chips for Wounds, and blue chips for any oddball status I need to mark which is pretty rare. Unlike my usual campaign logs where pages are covered in long descending hit point tracks, my notes for a session of this game just covers actions of note and lists which opponents or NPC's were encountered.


Playing it again, even as just a brief warm-up, reminded me all over again why I like this game so much. It's a beautiful system which feels like you're getting a lot done in a short period of time but with enough detail to make it worth doing. It is very much on the "Cinematic" side of things with characters blazing away, shaking off wounds, and moving on to the next big action sequence. It is more detailed than say ICONS, but less complex than M&M. There's enough mechanical crunch to make it interesting but not enough to need rules-heavy supplements. Most of the supporting material is campaign material with a few rules tweaks or additions to flesh out that particular universe - superpowers in Neccessary Evil, expanded rules for sailing ships and ship combat in Pirates, more 1870's-specific gear in Deadlands, 1960's gear in Tour of Darkness, etc.


This session also helped me recognize bits of other games in there too. There are elements of d6 Star Wars  in Savage Worlds that really jump out at me now after having gone through that system in some detail, including changes that I would make to that system as far as movement and actions and paring the skill list down to its core. I think if I ever go for a lighter Star Wars game it will use these rules.


In addition to the official material, there is a very strong community attitude of do-it-yourself online. There are numerous conversions of other games out there and numerous home grown sets of campaign material. Check out this page - everything from Harry Potter to World of Warcraft to TORG to Eberron to Star Trek and Warhammer 40,000 - that's a pretty wide range!


So this session got things started - what's my plan? Not sure. I'm going to run them through the old Deadlands starter adventure "Comin' Round the Mountain" (which I have never gotten to run) because I think it looks like fun. Hopefully that will happen this weekend and we can include Apprentice Who in this one. After that I may run a little thing I had written up years ago set in the Great Maze and after that well we will just see where things go. It's very unusual for me to go into a potential campaign situation without some kind of outline but I don't really feel the need for that yet with this game. Since we already have ongoing D&D 4E, Star Wars, and ICONS games with occsional forays into D&D Basic and MSH I don;t thin I need to over plan this. Plus I don't have a really compelling idea for a long term campaign of this yet. I'm feeling it as more of an episodic thing, more like "this week on Deadlands - the Night Train!" rather than a zero to hero epic that spans 50 sessions and 2 years of real time. I think the more segmented approach will work here so I'm going to try it that way for now.

Holiday Campaign Necromancy - Zebulon Space Returns!

The extended holiday weekend was a good one with much family time, football, Apprentice Twilight's birthday, and general goodness. The long-awaited return of our X-Box 360 from the grave cut into some of the home game time but I still managed to work in two sessions with the Apprentices, the first of which was the resurrection of our Star Wars Saga campaign. Binder still on shelf, notes still on computer, ideas still in head ... DING! It was the one game that Red, Blaster, and Who could all agree on so that's what we played first. The outline for it is detailed here but in short it's a conversion of the old Star Frontiers Volturnis campaign to the Saga version of Star Wars. We got off to a strong start earlier this year and we all had a good time but it was bumped back several times in favor of more D&D and then stopped coming up in conversation. Things are better now.



When we last left off, the PC's (two Jedi padawans and a rodian scoundrel) had fought some space pirates in the corridors of their ship, discovered it was damaged beyond repair, made it to an escape pod, and crashed on an unfamiliar planet. That was Chapter One as outlined in my Campaign ... Outline.



Chapter Two begins with the stranded heroes picking up their packs and getting their bearings. With the 3 salvaged survival packs in the pod they figured they had about 4 days worth of food and water, more if they stretched it. Surveying the land around the mfrom atop the rocky outcrop they had smashed into, they saw desert, lots and lots of Tatooine-esque desert, with some mountains in the distance. They also spied a small dome-like mound a few klicks from their rock, so they decided to head their first.



At the mound they find that it is hollow and entered via a small opening. Inside is a well. There's not much room but they can all 3 fit inside so they take shelter from the sun and Apprentice Blaster's Kel Dor Jedi decides to sample the water. Blowing his Survivial skill check, he decides that any well someone would protect must be good and takes a nice big drink of it. Aprentice Red's Human Jedi does somewhat better with his Survival check and remembers that ground water can be dangerous so he should use the toxin scanner in his survival pack before drinking. This begins what I suspect will be a long-running joke about "remember that time in Jedi Scouts when we went camping?" and it was pretty funny. He determines via the scanner that the water is heavy in arsenic and should be boiled and trapped in a tarp for safety.  They are trying to determine if they have firestarting gear when Apprentice Who's Scoundrel draws his blaster pistol and shoots some rags they have gathered, pointing out the obvious. Late in the day a sandstorm blows in and they decide to wait it out inside the well dome. Once it's over they head for the mountains, making occasional Survival checks and Perception checks to navigate to rock outcroppings and rough patches as they travel, seeking shelter and signs of civillization.



On Day 2 they hear the sound of a vehicle in the distance and hunker down in a convenient rock formation (Stealth checks), realizing that they have made no effort to cover their tracks as they travel. A skiff approaches from the way they have come, back towards the crash site, likely following their tracks. It's pretty high up but three figures peer over the side and it bears an unfamiliar insignia, a circle of red stars. Uncertain as to whether it's friend or foe, Apprentice Blaster's Jedi stands up, hands clear, and hails them. They hear a clear "yep, they're from the ship" a split second before the three open up with blaster rifles. Annoyed at the response, frustrated by the 50 meter gap (no lightsaber throws or force leaps here), and tired of traveling by foot, he yells out "try not to hurt the vehicle", pulls out a blaster pistol, and returns fire, frying one of the presumed pirates. Apprentice Red tries to focus on the force but can't quite pull it together, but the Rodian drops another hostile in one shot, staying down in the rocks for cover. At this point the remaining shooter calls out "go go get us out of here" to the unseen pilot and the skiff streaks away over the desert. Since it headed towards the mountains the trio decides they must be headed in the right direction. They are very disappointed that they did not acquire the skiff and decide their best chance to get a vehicle is to leave their tracks visible to try and lure in pirates or scroungers. Leaving VERY OBVIOUS tracks they continue walking towards the mountains, being even more careful to look for shelter as they go and especially as they end their marches each day.



Day 3 is largely uneventful until they spot something moving towards them under the sand (described to them as looking like Bugs Bunny when he travels underground). Blaster and Who pull guns while Red charges towards it. As it closes the last few meters, a "fin" pops up out of the sand and then a whole bunch of teeth are suddenly headed for the impetuous Jedi. Blaster and Who open up on it and wound the thing but it clamps down on Red's leg and we learn about the concept of the Damage Threshold in Saga Edition. Wounded pretty seriously, Jedi Red manages to concentrate long enough to force blast the thing off of his leg and onto its back where it expires from the massive trauma inflicted. Dubbing it a "Sand Shark", they study the beast as the Scoundrel Treats the Injury with a medpack.



Unshaken by the attacks on Day 2 and Day 3, the party continues on Day 4. Stopped for a rest they suddenly see plume of dust rising up behind them. A couple of dozen riders crest a dune within view and pause. Five of them break off and approach closer, with one of them finally stopping the dinosaur like beast he rides, laying down his weapons, and approaching with tentacles out and making sounds the heroes do not understand. Jedi Red reaches out with the force to make contact and to his surprise is contacted back! Jedi Blaster joins in and soon everyone is sharing thoughts of peaceful intent, danger in the desert, and the need to head for more friendly countryside. The  octopus-like creatures are called the Ul-Mor and offer aid to the trio if they agree to join the tribe - this is a tribal law thing. They do and are soon following along on borrowed Lopers, riding across the desert. The Ul-More mention an underground shortcut to their homelands and a ritual of manhood needed to become full members of the tribe but the team is just happy to be headed out of the desert among friendly folk.

DM Notes:
It was good to dust off the rulebooks and campaign notes for this one. There was time spent at the beginning refamiliarizing with characters and rules and filling in any blank spots on the character sheets (except for name, apparently) and recalling the overall situation.





Star Frontiers has a device called a Toxy-Rad gauge that detects poisons. I'm not sure if Star Wars does or not but I included it because it made sense. That was more fun with poison than I've had in a long time. "Jedi Scouts" or "Padawan Scouts" - it was funny in the room, and the firestarter question was funny too.





The patrolling pirate encounter in the original is just supposed to be a dramatic thing to let the players know the pirates are active on the planet. That seemed like a letdown too so I turned it into a combat encounter. There wasn't much chance they were going to get the skiff but a gunfight beats a simple flyby any day. The pirates in the original are the "Star Devils". This led me to a bit of a crisis - would Star Wars have a "Devil" reference? Trek does, but Trek is Now + 300 years. Star Wars has nothing to do with the real world, history, or religion, so I don't think it would, so I changed it on the fly. It caught me off guard but it's kind of important for giving the bad guys an identity.





The Sand Shark - what it's called in the original module - is just a reskinned massif stat-wise, which I described as a cross between a shark and an alligator. Both of these outdoor combats helped make the Jedi players aware that while sabers and force powers are good indoors, some of them have serious limitations in a wide-open outdoor environment and that 30 meters is not nearly as long there as it might seem on a gridded map. Damage Threshold is an alternate axis of damage, separate from hit points, that inflicts a -1 to -5 on actions, depending on severity. Lots of damage at once, poison, fatigue, radiation, and certain weapons can send one down the condition track, eventually causing unconsciousness. It's a nice blend of simplicity and effectiveness and gives the game an alternative to hit point damage for showing effects.





The Ul-Mor encounter went pretty well with Use the Force checks and diplomacy and actual role-playing all combinning nicely. There is some curiousity about exactly how they get inducted into the tribe but they're willing to wait and see. They all thought the idea of octopus-people riding dinosaurs was kind of cool and I will agree that it's not something you see everyday and that it's not really out of place in a Star Wars game.





The total laughing breakdown of the game came when I was describing the desert and one of them thought I said "Trampoline" instead of Tattooine right after someone else had made a comment about force-hopping across the desert and this rolled into jokes about the "wide, flat, low-gravity desert world of Trampoleen" that had us all laughing our heads off. It's pretty good when they can make me lose my focus with a sustained funny, so this run was an all-around win. 

Motivational Monday