D&D 5E Free 60+ page Guide to Sword & Sorcery for 5E D&D

[Fafnir_]

Healing Word and Mass Healing Word can be cast anytime the above condition is met (in fact, the cultist cannot cast them in any other way). The spells do not need to be prepared and do not count against the number of prepared spells.

Thanks for the clarification!

 

[Blue Orange]

Then again, plenty of people play Moephidus Conan game, with i find horribly cluttery and laden down with rules minutae, so what do I know? I certainly know many gamers LIKE rolling dice for the sake of rolling dice, almost as if the dice rolling in itself is part of the narrative experience.

I think the tactile and auditory aspects of dice rolling probably are part of the experience. There's a reason gambling games have used them for millennia. There was an old OSR blog that suggested that the disconnect between the seriousness of the story and the jocular attitude many players had to it was, itself, part of the experience. A lot of the baggage attached to RPGs is probably carried along for a reason--it works and people enjoy it. They've tried using cards instead of dice (Everway), not using dice (Amber), and while everyone thinks they're neat ideas they don't seem to catch on.

 

[CapnZapp]

I think the tactile and auditory aspects of dice rolling probably are part of the experience. There's a reason gambling games have used them for millennia. There was an old OSR blog that suggested that the disconnect between the seriousness of the story and the jocular attitude many players had to it was, itself, part of the experience. A lot of the baggage attached to RPGs is probably carried along for a reason--it works and people enjoy it. They've tried using cards instead of dice (Everway), not using dice (Amber), and while everyone thinks they're neat ideas they don't seem to catch on.

Sure... just to clarify though - "not rolling dice" has not been on the table. All we're discussing is how many dice to be rolled...

 

[Paid a bod yn dwp]

Really good discussion on the Sword & Sorcery genre in the Good Friends Of Jackson Elias podcast. It’s in two parts. Recommended:

Sword and Sorcery part 1 - Blasphemous Tomes

The Good Friends of Jackson Elias explore the shared roots of sword and sorcery and the Cthulhu Mythos, picking some favourite stories

blasphemoustomes.com

Also really good to see the new development in the Xoth players guide. Playing into the inspiration mechanic and motivations is very good.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Reading through this for the first time. Impressive effort! I'm only in the cultures section, but I like how you've defined those.

Question: how does the disadvantage against Aberrations/Undead/Fiends work out in practice? Seems like it could be kind of severe. What if it were instead disadvantage on the Frightful Presence checks against those types? That would also fit better with my own interpretation of the trope you are describing, in which Conan (for example...) feels superstitious dread, but then he overcomes it.

Also (and maybe this in there...I've only just started reading) I love what you are doing with Inspiration, both how it is earned and that it stacks three times, but may I suggest you allow it to be spent after the roll? Sort of like the Lucky feat. Makes it way more useful.

 

[xoth.publishing]

Reading through this for the first time. Impressive effort! I'm only in the cultures section, but I like how you've defined those.

Thanks, glad you like it!

Question: how does the disadvantage against Aberrations/Undead/Fiends work out in practice? Seems like it could be kind of severe. What if it were instead disadvantage on the Frightful Presence checks against those types? That would also fit better with my own interpretation of the trope you are describing, in which Conan (for example...) feels superstitious dread, but then he overcomes it.

Yeah, it's quite a severe (but situational) hindrance. On the other hand, having a +1 permanent bonus to AC, and always having advantage on Perception, are pretty sweet benefits, so I'd say it evens out. (And the other cultures have pretty severe drawbacks as well.)

Also (and maybe this in there...I've only just started reading) I love what you are doing with Inspiration, both how it is earned and that it stacks three times, but may I suggest you allow it to be spent after the roll? Sort of like the Lucky feat. Makes it way more useful.

The Lucky feat is considered by many to be overpowered, and is banned at many tables (including mine). So that would make inspiration a bit too good, although I guess it depends on how generous the GM is with giving out inspiration. With the Lucky feat usage resets after every long rest; I wouldn't typically hand out inspiration so frequently (in any case it is very situational, of course).

Note that “by the book”, you can only have/keep 1 point of inspiration from traits/ideals/bonds/flaws, while the Cultures in the Xoth Player's Guide says you can have up to 3 points of inspiration from roleplaying your culture. It's left up to the GM if he wants to track these two “inspiration pools” separately. For ease of use, personally I'd allow up to 3 points of inspiration whether it was from traits/ideals/bonds/flaws or from culture, ie just combine the two pools into one.

 

[Bill Zebub]

The Lucky feat is considered by many to be overpowered, and is banned at many tables (including mine). So that would make inspiration a bit too good, although I guess it depends on how generous the GM is with giving out inspiration. With the Lucky feat usage resets after every long rest; I wouldn't typically hand out inspiration so frequently (in any case it is very situational, of course).

Well bear in mind that if everybody is using the same mechanic, then it levels the playing field. I've found that with Inspiration as written everybody keeps saving it for something more important, and then they eventually forget them have it. But when you switch it to after-the-roll they suddenly remember they have it in important moments.

I've long thought about what I'd want in a sword-and-sorcery system, and two things I was hoping to find (and disappointed to not find) in the Modipheus system are:

An elegant sub-system for weapon quality
Two goals that seem contradictory but I think can co-exist are:
1) The standard RPG excitement/incentive around discovering higher quality weapons
2) The genre trope (at least, in Conan) of constantly using new weapons

The solution, I think, is for a system in which weapons suffer damage through use, and if you don't get them repaired eventually they become useless. Higher quality weapons would be more resistant to damage (and maybe more expensive/difficult to repair). Thus it's still desirable (and thus exciting) to find really well made weapons, but the main benefit they confer is just that they are more reliable. Even the best ones will break eventually, and knowing that means that if you lose them (for all the myriad reasons that might occur during an adventure) it's not the end of the world.

"Scene Transitions"
This is another "two birds with one stone" thing:
1) My ideal sword-and-sorcery campaign would consist of self-contained adventures all over the world, without my having to necessarily do all the travel and other "filler" in between. You know, like Conan
2) There's the problem (in all RPGs) of what to do with your loot.

My idea here is a kind of down-time minigame where you roll on tables and a narrative unfolds of what happens in between your adventures. How do you lose all that gold? What happened to your weapon? What allies/enemies did you make? How did you go from carousing in a seaport to becoming a pirate captain 1,000 miles away?

I think it would be a blast for the dice to basically generate those scene transitions we read in the Howard stories, so that I can start off the next adventure in the right place, probably once again penniless. The more gold you ended the last session with, the more starting benefits you are likely to have in this one, perhaps in the form of a quality weapon or particularly good horse, or maybe some specific story "cards" that you get to play once. E.g., "Ally in an unexpected place" or whatever.

Anyway, throwing those ideas out there in the hope that somebody bakes them into a good sword-and-sorcery game.

 

[xoth.publishing]

Well bear in mind that if everybody is using the same mechanic, then it levels the playing field. I've found that with Inspiration as written everybody keeps saving it for something more important, and then they eventually forget them have it. But when you switch it to after-the-roll they suddenly remember they have it in important moments.

With inspiration as written, you can only have 1 point of inspiration so you keep saving it for "something important". If you have more points to spend, it's easier to spend one (and thus it becomes easier to remember that you have them).

Two goals that seem contradictory but I think can co-exist are:
1) The standard RPG excitement/incentive around discovering higher quality weapons
2) The genre trope (at least, in Conan) of constantly using new weapons

The solution, I think, is for a system in which weapons suffer damage through use, and if you don't get them repaired eventually they become useless. Higher quality weapons would be more resistant to damage (and maybe more expensive/difficult to repair). Thus it's still desirable (and thus exciting) to find really well made weapons, but the main benefit they confer is just that they are more reliable. Even the best ones will break eventually, and knowing that means that if you lose them (for all the myriad reasons that might occur during an adventure) it's not the end of the world.

Check out the rule in the Player's Guide that lets you sacrifice a weapon (or shield) to block a critical hit. If you want to introduce different qualities of weapons, you could say that these don't auto-break when blocking a crit. A "good quality" weapon could avoid breakage on a roll of 19-20, a "superior quality" could avoid breaking on a roll of 17-20, and so on (magical weapons could avoid breakage on, say, a roll of 11-20). That's easier than tracking damage to weapons (which sounds very fiddly).

This is another "two birds with one stone" thing:
1) My ideal sword-and-sorcery campaign would consist of self-contained adventures all over the world, without my having to necessarily do all the travel and other "filler" in between. You know, like Conan
2) There's the problem (in all RPGs) of what to do with your loot.

My idea here is a kind of down-time minigame where you roll on tables and a narrative unfolds of what happens in between your adventures. How do you lose all that gold? What happened to your weapon? What allies/enemies did you make? How did you go from carousing in a seaport to becoming a pirate captain 1,000 miles away?

This sounds cool and I wouldn't mind this (rolling on tables to see what happens between adventures) if I was a player, but I guess some players would dislike the "loss of control" over their characters. If the group is OK with it, it could lead to many fun and interesting stories!

 

[CapnZapp]

Implementing weapon quality and damage as a X in 20 risk is a much more appropriately simple and easy solution for Sword & Sorcery than, well, tracking "item hit points", in my mind!

 

[CapnZapp]

One solution to the "rolling on between-story tables is great except when you don't like the result" problem is to add a mechanism where you can spend gold to influence the result (by rerolling or simply modifying the outcome).

Anything that makes players actively want their characters to risk life and limb for cash - despite the genre trope pre venting you from hoarding it - is a good thing!