Let's have a quickie! The 50g Houserule.

[Rachel]

Yeah, I just about lost it at the table - I'd taken pains to outline the mysterious chest under the bed, etc .. but no, she had no interest in stopping to explore. You could almost hear her think to herself, "What? I'll just take the sword from the first one I kill."

Sorry but I just had to jump back in here one more time. How in the world did you avoid saying something like "er, did you wanna uuuuuh make a Perception check or maybe um, hmmm look under the bed first...?"

What discipline!

 

[Nytmare]

Thoughts?

It's a hell of a big change for most people, but I ran E6 for about a year and a half which includes Ryan Stoughton's Death Flag rules from Raising the Stakes.

The long and the short of the rule was that a character did not die, until the player decided that they were at an appropriately dramatic point in the story. You could be captured, or left for dead. Kept alive to live with the shame of your defeat, or saved at the last minute by friends or kinsmen, but a character did not die, until the player decided that the fight was important enough.

I'm sure that there has to be someone who has hammered the concept into 4th Ed, but I haven't seen it yet. My first swipe at it would be something along the lines of:

"When you raise your Death Flag, you get 4 Action Points. For the rest of that Encounter, you can spend as many Action Points as you want, but no more than 1 Action Point per round. As long as your Death Flag is raised, all the normal rules regarding death apply. You can lower your Death Flag by spending 4 Action Points."
​

 

[Amaroq]

Oooh, interesting read, Nytmare, thanks for the link!

We already use a variant of "The Players Roll All The Dice", and the "Death Flag" has a bit of appeal to me. Good stuff to think about!

Sorry but I just had to jump back in here one more time. How in the world did you avoid saying something like "er, did you wanna uuuuuh make a Perception check or maybe um, hmmm look under the bed first...?"

What discipline!

Well .. we played the first session in a kind of unique way which took pains to define the character's backgrounds, etc, litter the world with NPC's they've met, learn background stories of the world, etc - the sort of things you might get from reading fluff books for a published campaign but are really necessary to get the players "up to speed" in a home-brewed world.

So, the character was in her late teens, lived in a cabin in the woods with her father, a former warrior who'd trained her in all the combat odds but kept his history (and hers) a mystery. She'd turned into a bit of a woodsman (spent her Background to get Nature as a class skill), and spent lots of her time wandering the woods in solitude.

When we shifted into live action, she was wandering deep in the woods as was her wont, when she'd spotted some strange humanoid footprints - slight claw indentations, definitely not human .. and then the village church bell began to peal, a long constant alarm.

I drew out a triangle with maybe a 160-degree angle: she was one vertex, the cabin was a second, and the village was the third, with the hypoteneuse of course from her to the village. I asked what she wanted to do; she said "rush to the village"; I reminded her that the cabin was basically on the way, and asked if she was sure she didn't want to go to the cabin; she said she was sure.

... The way I DM is basically to describe a timeline of events that will happen without PC intervention ; in this case, the orcs had found the cabin, dad had managed to open the chest and get out his sword, but was outnumbered and losing. So, "encounter 1" on my sheet was her arriving, fighting alongside her dad, killing off the attackers only to discover that he'd taken a mortal wound, and getting his last words as character exposition as he passed the family sword to her.

Without PC intervention, more orcs survived that fight, dad died, and the orcs started looting the cabin .. which was the scene she discovered when she finally got there much later, and she was then wandering the world with the family sword but without the exposition.

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

Oh and yah, I am a simulationist. For some reason I don't abstract well.

I'm a simulationist too, but I've given up on 'fixing' D&D in that way. It's just not what the game, and most of its players, want it to be about. Instead, I focus my sim-energy on a home brew game.

 

[ravenheart]

It's a hell of a big change for most people, but I ran E6 for about a year and a half which includes Ryan Stoughton's Death Flag rules from Raising the Stakes.

The long and the short of the rule was that a character did not die, until the player decided that they were at an appropriately dramatic point in the story. You could be captured, or left for dead. Kept alive to live with the shame of your defeat, or saved at the last minute by friends or kinsmen, but a character did not die, until the player decided that the fight was important enough.

I'm sure that there has to be someone who has hammered the concept into 4th Ed, but I haven't seen it yet. My first swipe at it would be something along the lines of:

"When you raise your Death Flag, you get 4 Action Points. For the rest of that Encounter, you can spend as many Action Points as you want, but no more than 1 Action Point per round. As long as your Death Flag is raised, all the normal rules regarding death apply. You can lower your Death Flag by spending 4 Action Points."
​

Wow, I really like these ideas! Especially useful when you are running large groups and dungeon crawls. Consider it yoinked!

Really like the Death Flag rule, although I might reduce that to 3 Action Points, since my group is running a Chaos Scar campaign (hard to reach those milestones!).

I was already thinking about implementing a Players Roll All the Dice rule, but I'm still not sure what to do with enemy saving throws and damage rolls. The players could roll to sustain save ends effects on enemies, but what do you do with effects not inflicted by the players (ex. ongoning fire damage from a terrain feature)?
Maybe I'll leave it to the DM after all, but I guess applying a single saving throw to a creature against all (save ends)-effects might speed things up (the same goes for recharging powers). As for enemy damage, perhaps average damage? Or low-to-average and high-to-average damage depending on the players defense roll?

Raising the Stakes seems like a fun feature to add some drama and creativity into the game, especially if grind is a worry (as it often is with 4E)! A lot of the players in my group (myself included) come together for poker nights regularly, so a familiar element of hazard like this might really hit the spot.

To add to this and combat grind, I had an idea of a tension meter system. This would emulate larger blinds and minimum wagers in poker, but be based on the amount of round elapsed. Thus, for every round after the first, the stakes go up. Not quite sure how this should work, but generally I think allowing greater benefit at greater risk is the key. This has the potential of turning into a death-spiral, but I'd like to avoid that (well, with the Death Flag rule, it would be more of a Near-Death-Spiral).

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

PS. Sorry for derailing the thread again, maybe I should fork this off?

 

[Starfox]

I'm a simulationist too, but I've given up on 'fixing' D&D in that way. It's just not what the game, and most of its players, want it to be about. Instead, I focus my sim-energy on a home brew game.

Very well said!

For good or bad 4E is what it is. More so than earlier editions, that supported a wider range of play styles. Trying to make it into something else is largely a colossal waste of effort.

I'm not saying you cannot modify or expand upon 4E. If you like 4E, by all means tinker with it.

What I do say is that if you dislike 4E, don't tinker with it. If you have trouble with basic tents of 4E, like the gamism, trying to fix them is just frustrating. Its better to tinker with a system where you like the basics.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

@Rachel I think the idea of low resource starts is great actually. I'm maybe not convinced that a 50 gp start would be my chosen way to do it is all. PCs will tend to pool their gp if they can and while some expensive stuff will be out of reach for a session or two the effect seems to fade kind of fast.

The real hard core version of this would be something like the "you were all traveling on a ship when a terrible storm arose." and the starting scene is the PCs all washed up naked on the beach. Well, OK, they get the clothes on their backs, see I'm a NICE DM. hehehe. Haven't run that one yet, but I'm thinking it could be a pretty cool lead in. The party can spend heroic tier trying to get off the island. Have I been watching too much TV?

 

[Holy Bovine]

One of my favourite RPGs, Warhammer, actually starts all PCs with 3d6 gp. They do get trappings based upon their starting class but actual gold is in very short supply. No PC I can recall started with armour better than a chain shirt. Of course Warhammer is very low magic, dark fantasy where just surviving a fight with a pack of orcs would be an incredibly heroic deed that only the toughest or luckiest people could possibly do.

 

[Saeviomagy]

Anyways, just wanted to point out that furthermore, what weapon do most rogues start with? A dagger or two. They are 1gp. Armor? Max. leather...25g. Thieve's tools? 20gp....mmmm *does some math*.

Adventurer's kit: 11gp (after taking the version with no sunrods). Whoops.

Anyway, I really don't like it as a general rule, for a few reasons

It has a very lopsided effect. The rogue, as you show, is almost unaffected. A paladin is denied a class feature. Paladins, warriors and warlords end up being unable to buy their armor + a single weapon. The iconic warrior (chainmail, shield, longsword) is impossible. Rangers can't afford leather armor and 2 longswords. Or leather armor and a long bow.

It limits flexibility. As above, rangers, warriors, warlords and paladins can't even afford to buy ONE weapon. That means they can't, for instance, buy a sword and some javelins for when the fight is at range.

It reduces any of that interest that comes from gear shopping, and eliminates the "aha!" moment. ie - the time when one looks down your equipment list, and there it is: that 10ft of chain you bought on a whim at 1st level, here to save the day!

Forget about doing anything for flavour. 10gp for a holy symbol, instead of owning a ranged weapon? Yeah, right...

Ritual casting: woot! a feat with no effect at first level (because a ritual book costs 50g, and rituals will need to be added on top of that).

I mean, I'm all for the DM crafting a scenario and limiting character creation based on that, but having a blanket rule that halves starting gold on the grounds that it's 'more fun if you don't have stuff' is a really, really bad idea.

 

[Rachel]

The real hard core version of this would be something like the "you were all traveling on a ship when a terrible storm arose." and the starting scene is the PCs all washed up naked on the beach. Well, OK, they get the clothes on their backs, see I'm a NICE DM. hehehe. TV?

LOL how generous!