a blog of short and medium length ttrpg thinking posts

Friday, January 19, 2024

ADEPT: a modest proposal

Are you reinventing RuneQuest or Traveller this time? You fool. You rube. You absolute buffoon. I am reinventing HârnMaster.

the xkcd comic about how standards proliferate
xkcd: Standards

Listen. Everyone hates the six-score array. It sucks, and the history of non-D&D RPGs is practically a history of variants of the array and its uses. There are plenty of theoretical issues to raise with the standard six. However, here are three problems only the worst pedant would have with it:

  • The canonical order of the abilities is not alphabetical.
  • Two abilities share an initial letter.
  • There is no mnemonic device for the abilities.

I propose to solve these (and really, only these) problems with the ADEPT array:

Sunday, January 7, 2024

3eish: combat

Blogger ate a draft of this post and I'm not pleased about it. I realize I've posted ideas along these lines before, but here are the versions I like the best now.

two warriors in armor fighting
Artist: Simon Gocal

Action

Surprised figures do not move or act during the first round that they join combat. Otherwise, the adventurers and their enemies move and act in alternate phases:

  1. Enemies move
  2. Adventurers move & act
  3. Enemies act
  4. Attacks are resolved

A figure's movement ends if they enter the reach of a foe that can act. If they start within its reach, their movement is limited to one inch.

A figure's movement depends on the load they are carrying. A burdened figure may move twice their Size (in inches, scale TBD), one in heavy kit may move three times their Size and one in light kit may move four times their Size. If a burdened figure moves more than their Size, on an unburdened one twice their Size, they may not act.

A figure may drop what they are holding, or drop into a kneel (-1 Size) or to the ground (-2 Size) freely. Instead of movement, a figure may:

  • Concentrate on magic
  • Draw or stow an item
  • Open or close a door
  • Stand from a kneel
  • Take aim

Or similar things; otherwise, these are all actions. Standing from the ground allows only one inch of movement and no other actions.

Attacking

An attacker states their aim, for example, draw out, disarm, push back, restrain, seize, throw or wound. Then, they make their roll and add +1 for every 4HP they currently have. Subtract 4 if they are fighting in an awkward or unfamiliar manner. Then apply situational modifiers:

  • In hand-to-hand, apply the attacker's Strength modifier. Add +2 if the target was attacked by another this round.
  • Fighting at reach, apply the attacker's Dexterity modifier. Add +2 if the target entered the attacker's reach this round.
  • Shooting at range, apply the attacker's Intelligence modifier. Add +2 if the target has not moved this round.

Attacks at range are resolved first, followed by attacks at reach in descending order of reach and finally by hand-to-hand attacks.

An attack succeeds if the modified roll is at least equal to the target's defense. This has two components. A figure's dodge is 3 plus their Wisdom modifier. A figure's protection is 3, plus one for every layers of armor, source of cover or increment of the target's Size (in inches) between the attacker and target.

  • When taking cover or other defensive action, defense is dodge + three times protection.
  • Otherwise, when able to act, defense is dodge + two times protection.
  • Otherwise, defense is two times protection.

If the attack is successful, the attacker rolls damage based on their own Size. 

Example Size Die Type
cat 0 d2
fairy, monkey 1 d2
dog, elf 2 d4
deer, man 3 d6
horse, thark 4 d8
ogre, rhinoceros 5 d10
elephant, giant 6 d12
dragon 7 d20

The target may choose to either lose that many HP (if they have that many) or accept the aim of the attack.

Odd attack rolls fail against targets that are concealed from their attackers. If the target is totally concealed, the attacker must have some way of discerning their exact position before attempting an attack in the first place.

Wounding

When a figure is wounded, the severity of the wound depends on how much the damage exceeds their current HP. For these purposes, subtract 2 from the damage of bare fists or feet. A wounded figure makes a saving throw, adding their Constitution modifier.

Excess Wound DC Success Failure
2 or less Light 12 Fine Unconscious
3 to 5 Serious 15 Unconscious Dying
6 or more Critical 18 Dying Dead

A dying character will die if their wound is not treated within a few minutes. An unconscious character may make another save within a few minutes to come to, otherwise they remain out for a few hours.

Saturday, January 6, 2024

3eish: what's a level

Theoryposting, maybe I'll get to the point of concrete details by the end of this post, maybe I won't.

Artist: Tennis Cramer

So, my goal of 3eish is to make something that feels like 3e to me, while also keeping it light enough to hold the whole thing in mind and play fast and easy. Can't get rid of levels without it starting to feel like something else entirely so it's worth asking: what's a level. In 3e there are a couple clear answers:

  • One HD.
  • 1, 3/4 or 1/2 a point of BAB
  • 8, 6, 4, 2 + Int skill points
  • 1/2 or 1/3 a point of each saving throw
  • 1/4 of an one-point improvement to an ability score (1/8 of a one-point improvement to its modifier)
  • 1/3 of a feat and some class features
  • various scaling on spells you cast

There are some rationalizations that suggest themselves, like making attack bonus or saving throws a part of the skill system, but I've been down most of those design roads at this point and most of them wind up reinventing RuneQuest. So instead I'm going to reinvent True20; a level is a feat and one HD and everything else falls out of that.

Let's nail that down somewhat:

  • As in the base rules, the benchmark for a boring feat is that it applies +2 on two different kinds of rolls. 
    • Boring feats (that only add bonuses to rolls) are now called skills and can be taken multiple times. This replace the skill list and save progressions; if a character does not have any skills that apply to a saving roll, they use 1/3 their level as a bonus.
    • Obviously not all feats are boring ones. The ones that grant more interesting abilities can generally only be taken once.
  • Each feat specifies an amount of HP (2, 3 or 4) gained when you take it. If you're proficient with it, add +1 to an attack roll for every 4HP you currently have. If you're not proficient, apply a -3 penalty.
    • Abilities for combat add 4HP.
    • Skills and miscellaneous abilities add 3HP.
    • Magic abilities adds 2HP.

You may notice there's no real purpose left for classes. That's probably for the best, let's lose them. Carve out their interesting bits into feats and leave the rest.

One-feat character creation is probably too bare to be fun. Instead we'll have two-feat character creation (truly, I have a dizzying intellect). There's a special set of feats called backgrounds, and you pick two of them to start. Your starting HP is 4 if both of them have experience with violence, 3 if one does and 2 otherwise.

The 3e PHB had 7 races and 11 classes, so for parity with its 77 combinations a pool of backgrounds would need...a pool of 14 backgrounds (14 choose 2 is 91, fourteen more combinations for a pool with three fewer elements). Now that's of course not the full range of customization of a 1st level 3e character but it's close enough for my purposes.

Tuesday, January 2, 2024

the great humanoid relative size survey

comparative height chart of 5e races
Artist: Jay Robinson

There has been some interest in the purple OSR discord about what the relative sizes of various fantasy humanoids should be. I decided to make a quick survey asking people to size them on a scale from 0-10 with humans at 5 and send it around, and managed to collect 79 responses at the time of writing (though I exclude the response at 12/12/2023 14:44:45 from analysis as an outlier).

I'm just gonna do what seems most obvious to me and look at numerical averages, plus or minus one standard deviation:

Name Avg Stdev Minus Plus Dev Geq Man
Hobbit 2.68 0.64 2.04 3.32 -3.63
Fairy 0.76 1.19 -0.43 1.95 -3.56
Goblin 2.76 0.7 2.06 3.46 -3.2
Gnome 2.25 1.01 1.24 3.26 -2.72
Dwarf 3.5 0.71 2.79 4.21 -2.11
Kobold 2.58 1.25 1.33 3.83 -1.94
Ratfolk 3.26 1.07 2.19 4.33 -1.63
Faun 3.99 1.15 2.84 5.14 -0.88
Nymph 4.36 1.21 3.15 5.57 -0.53
Morlock 4.43 1.14 3.29 5.57 -0.5
Hobgoblin 4.72 1.2 3.52 5.92 -0.23
Half-elf 5 0.37 4.63 5.37 0
Human 5 0 5 5 0
Different Elf 5.11 1.66 3.45 6.77 0.07
Elf 5.16 0.97 4.19 6.13 0.16
Gnoll 5.43 1.33 4.1 6.76 0.32
Merfolk 5.33 0.78 4.55 6.11 0.42
Lizardfolk 5.5 0.93 4.57 6.43 0.54
Half-orc 5.54 0.65 4.89 6.19 0.83
Orc 5.94 0.72 5.22 6.66 1.31
Wolfman 6.05 0.78 5.27 6.83 1.35
Bugbear 6.65 1.22 5.43 7.87 1.35
Troll 7.64 0.86 6.78 8.5 3.07
Ogre 7.8 0.82 6.98 8.62 3.41
Ent 9.17 0.88 8.29 10.05 4.74

Dev Geq Man means the number of standard deviations between the average response and 5, the size of a human being. Now, let's just make a couple of observations:

  • About 72% of respondents indicated that Elves are human-sized or larger.
  • Trolls, Ogres and Ents are very large, three or four standard deviations above puny humans. Orcs, Wolfmen and Bugbears are somewhat large, at least one standard deviation above man.
  • Hobbits, Fairies and Goblins are very small, three standard deviations below humans. Note that there's also a strong consensus that fairies are smaller, but goblins are about the same size as hobbits. Gnomes, Dwarves, Kobolds and Ratfolk are also small, one or two standard deviations below humans.
  • Fauns, Nymphs, Morlocks, Hobgoblins, Half-elves, Elves, Different Elves, Gnolls, Merfolk, Lizardfolk and Half-orcs are all on average within one standard deviation of humans.
  • There is the least consensus on the size of Different Elves, which is unsurprising as that category is kind of just a joke about how many kinds of elves there are. Seventy-five percent of they 68 respondents who gave a size for "Elf, but Different (TM)" gave a size equal to or greater than they gave for Elf. They are followed, in uncertainty, by Kobolds, Bugbears, Nymphs, Fauns, Morlocks and Ratfolk.

Now, there is considerable overlap between most of these categories if standard deviations are included. Some of the categories that do not overlap (that is, their averages differ by at least the sum of their standard deviations) are:

  • Fairies are smaller than all but Gnomes and Kobolds.
  • Goblins are smaller than Hobgoblins.
  • Orcs are smaller than Trolls, but not necessarily smaller than Bugbears.
  • Ogres and Ents are larger than all but Bugbears and Trolls.

I don't think there are any great mysteries being revealed here, but I hope you enjoyed reading it. Please note that while I may have majored in math, I never took a statistics class. If you have a better handle on analyzing this kind of data, please try your hand at it.