Game Administrivia

[BSF]

I have been thinking that the racial paragons are kind of interesting. My biggest problem with them is that I am not sure how I want to handle half-bloods, Elves, Aelfar, Durgon, Thurgon, and Gnomes. (good grief!)

I am also toying with the Bloodlines. That might be an interesting route for a character to take as well.

 

[BSF]

To-Hit, Damage, and Description

To be honest, I am finding our combat to be a tad dry. The RP is cool, and combat is cool, but why don't we try to merge the two just a little more? What I would like is a little more focus on what your PC is doing as opposed to just how much damage you did.

As well, we need to speed up combat a bit more. With this many players, we need to be very cognizant of how much time is spent on each person's time in the combat round. Especially as we start to get into the realm of iterative attacks, we will want to keep the game moving quickly so we can have fun playing instead of waiting.

Oddly enough, I think these goals can work together and might make the game a lot more fun for all of us. There are two changes we will be testing in the next few weeks to see how they work out. The first is initiative cards. The second is how you roll your attacks.

Initiative Cards:
Initiative cards are simply an extension of using 3x5 cards. People have used 3x5 cards for years. Heck, we used them in the last campaign when I was prepped for them. JD Wiker with The Game Mechanics formalized them in a PDF. You can find the PDF at The Game Mechanics Web Site. If you want to download the PDF and fill in the information for your character, that would be great. However, I think I might be able to come up with my own layout for the initiative cards that will highlight everything just a little bit better.

Once we begin using Initiative cards, we will sort the cards out in order of initiative. Then, we just go down the pile and when your card comes up, it is your turn. Easy right? The way people suggest using initiative cards is to tilt them to one side if somebody holds an action. We won't do that. If you want to ready or hold an action, then I will hand the card to you. Once you are ready to execute your action, you will hand it back to me. This will help me avoid the forgotten held actions when I am distracted by events in the game. Basically, I am foisting it off to you so that if a held/readied action is forgotten, it is your fault. This prevents me from feeling bad about accidentally skipping you.

If it comes to your turn and you are not ready to do anything, I will hand your card to you and treat it like a held action. If you are using a new spell/power for the first time, please look up the details before it gets to your turn.

I think all of this will help us speed up combat and keep everything moving fluidly. I do expect that we will have a little difficulty adjusting to the changes at first. But it will get better pretty quickly.

Attack Rolls:
When rolling your attacks, I would also like you to roll your damage die (dice) at the same time. It would be cool if you can make some effort to describe your attack and I will describe the affect. If you have a variety of damage, such as a flaming sword, please use different color dice to differentiate the damage and tell me what kind of damge you rolled.

Here is the issue. Some creatures are tough and can just take damage until they fall over. Others are skilled. They might have class levels or whatever. All of this is abstractly represented as hit points. An attack that might eviscerate a commoner might not hurt a skilled fighter much. This is not because the fighter's body can suddenly suck up more damage, it is because the fighter is better at avoiding the death blow. Maybe that death blow is a near-miss instead. It still ticks away HP, but did not disembowel him. When you roll your attack and damage, I will describe the affect. This might cause a little discomfort for you initially because you won't be sure if that near-miss was close to a hit and did no damage, or a hit that did damage, but did not kill the opponent.

I think this will be a good thing because it will allow you to focus more on the cinematic aspect of the fight rather than tediously tracking the AC and HP of your opponent. By rolling the attack, and damage at the same time, I think we can speed up the combat as well. Certainly there are a number of people that swear this will speed things up, so I want to give it a try.

The long-term goal is to speed up combat, focus on description, and improve out overall fun aspect.

 

[BSF]

Death & Dying

This is the Death & Dying variant from Unearthed Arcana. For those of you with the book, it is on page 121.

The basic problem, as I see it, is that having a lower limit of -10 hp is fine at lower levels and gets progressively tougher at higher levels to maintain. It is quite possible to take one lighter hit at the wrong time and go from the point of being in danger of going down, to the danger of being outright killed in one blow. While character death does, and will, happen, there might be ways to keep an heroic feel to the game without removing the threat of death. Hence, our adoption of the alternate rules.

0 Hit Points
Characters cannot be reduced to below 0 Hit Points. 0 is the minimum number of Hit Points and any character that is reduced to 0 Hit Points must make a Fortitude save to avoid falling unconscious, or dying.

The Fortitude Save
When a character's hit points are reduced to 0, he must attempt a Fortitude save. (DC 10. +2 per 10 points of damage dealt by the attack of affect.) Success means the character is disabled. Failure means the character is dying. Failure by 10 or more means the character is dead. (On a natural 1, calculate the results normally.)

The possible results of the fortitude Save.
Disabled: A disabled character is conscious but can only take a single move or standard action in his turn. He moves at half speed. Move actions do not risk further injury, though standard actions, and any strenuous activity force another Fortitude save at the same DC to remain disabled. Otherwise, a disable character becomes dying when the action is complete. If a disabled character takes any lethal damage, she must make a new Fortitude save. Any result aside from dead means the character is now dying.

Dying: A dying character is unconscious and near death. Each round, the character must make a Fortitude save to attempt to become stable. (DC 10, + 1 per round after the first.)
If the character fails the save, she dies.
If the character succeeds by less than 5, he does not die, but does not improve. She must make continue to make a Fortitude save each round.
If the character succeeds by more than 5, but less than 10, he becomes stable and remains uncoscious.
If a character succeeds by more than 10, he becomes conscious and is disabled.
Another character can stabilize a dying character with a successful Heal check. (DC 15)

Stable: A stable character is unconscious. Each hour, she must make a Fortitude save to remain stable. (DC 10, +1 per hour after the first.)
If the character fails, he is dying.
If the character succeeds by less than 5, she does nto get any better, but does not get any worse. He must continue to make a Fortitude save each hour.
If the character succeeds by 5 or more, he becomes conscious and has 1 hit point.
Another character can attempt a Heal check (DC 15) by tending the character for at least 10 minutes between saves. Success grants the stable character a +2 bonus to the next Fortitude save.

Dead: A dead character's soul departs the body. Only powerful Divine Magic can help the character further.

Healing
A disabled, stable, or dying character has 0 hit points. Healing that raises her above 0 hit points revives the character fully once again.

 

[BSF]

Other Undead Turning Variants

The Complete Divine has another turning variant. It is simple and straightforward. Basically, when a Cleric turns, they do 1d6/level in HP damage to all undead within 30'. Each undead is allowed a will save for half damage.

That seems easy enough to remember. I'm not entirely sure I like it though. It seems as if it might be significantly more powerful than traditional turning. Especially since undead do not have a Con stat.

I do like the ease of use and maybe we should just playtest it a little to see how it works. Then, if we like the basic concept, but think it needs adjustment, we can do that then.

Thoughts?

 

[injuredwyvern]

Ceru has rebuke so how would that work under these circumstances

 

[BSF]

Hrrm, good question. Under those rules, Rebuke heals undead.

I kinda forgot that Ceru gets Rebuke Spirits. That changes the tone of the game somewhat. I have been looking to make it easier to handle undead, but since the same mechanic works for Spirits, I think we will stick with the rules as written.

Ceru's interaction with Spirits is very different in tone from turning/rebuking undead.

OK, I will just expect everyone to remember the rules when it comes time to do any turning/rebuking. No big deal, you should know your character's capabilities anyway. If you are in doubt, I would suggest copying the turn chart onto your character sheet for easy reference.

 

[BSF]

Status Sheets

I found a link to some decent status sheets today. http://www.d20srd.org/extras/statusLog.htm

What these allow you to do is dynamically change your bonuses for AC, Attack, etc. Yeah, I know a fair number of you track this all in your head or by jotting it down on your character sheet. But we have never really had very many bonuses like this crop up during the game. You might take a look just to see if you can use the sheet. For some of you, it might be easier.

 

[Tormal]

Cool, I can't actually look at them right now. For some reason work as decided security settings needed to be boosted... ? I don't know Anyway, i've seen similar sheets and I was looking for somone more a while back. This is kind of it, i'll check em out when I get home! Thanks!

 

[BSF]

A little maiming and tension?

We have changed the rules for Death & Dying. Now I am wondering if we want to change things around to give everyone more of an "impact of combat" feel. Right now, there are very few long-term affects from combat. Do you guys like that aspect of the game? Or would you like something with a little more threat to it?

Bastion Press released a supplement last year for handling critical hits so they can also do things like break bones, etc. Would we be interested in using such a system? Would there be any improvement in play and in character development? If you want to look at some of the reviews for Torn Asunder, you can find them here: http://www.enworld.org/reviews/index.php?sub=yes&where=currentprod&which=TACH

If there is enough interest, I can get a copy of the book so we can play around with it.

 

[Macbeth]

Torn Assunder certainly interests me, and if we do end up using it, I may end up getting a copy for myself.