dmsideblog

[dmsideblog]

hey here's a really dumb idea

so the city that most of the action my campaign has taken place in is primarily driven economically by a copper mine, and one of the miniatures I got out of a blind bag happened to be a copper dragon, which is basically perfect, because I had already intended there to be a dragon down in there. well, here's a idea that doesn't actually have any story implications yet but absolutely will later probably:

when they meet the drain, he'll tell them that he's there on a 500-year service mission with DSF. they'll probably ask what "DSF" stands for. it stands for "dragons without borders".

I apologize for this bad post.

[dmsideblog]

here’s some brief revisions for things I realized were probably flawed, and rules for combat in the system from my previous post:

for succeed/fail rolls, the default roll the player has to make is 10. this still makes it challenging to make these rolls (about 44% chance of success assuming the modifier is 0), but it nearly doubles the odds of success. the odds if you improve are 70%, and if you worsen, it’s 21%, which are pretty reasonable numbers. the goal of this system is that it’s fairly punishing in terms of succeeding on your roles unless you’re able to roll into things.

for easy tasks, the player has to make a 8 on succeed/fail rolls. even though that’s not a huge change from the base, the odds if a roll into it is improve/neither/worsen are 86%/67%/41%. that 41% is a bit higher than I’d like, but the other numbers are good.

for hard tasks, the player has to make a 12 on succeed/fail rolls. the odds for rolls into are 46%/23%/8%, which is a good representation of the idea that the task is something beyond most people’s capabilities.

for improve/worsen rolls, the abstract thing being represented isn’t the odds of success but the odds that your actions make a difference (either positive or negative), so the numbers needed for each result change not based on whether the thing you’re trying to do is harder but on whether the thing you’re doing to try to change things is more drastic. I won’t go over all the numbers, but for small, unexciting actions, worsen is 5 or below and improve is 12 or higher; and for big, dramatic actions, worsen is 7 or lower and improve is 10 or higher.

the reason I didn’t allow rolling an ability into another ability is because the potential to, for instance, roll a +5 ability into a +4 ability means that failure is almost impossible, but it doesn’t make sense for that system to simply not exist at all for abilities, because it’s a pretty crucial part of balance, so you can roll stats into abilities, but not vice versa, and you still can’t roll abilities into abilities. however, you can’t roll a stat into any ability that it modifies--for instance, you can’t roll strength into navigate.

and here’s a very rudimentary combat system, covering basic melee mechanics and healing for clerics:

your base HP is equal to 15 + endurance*2, which means that HP ranges from 9 to 21. this means that a character with -3 endurance can still take several hits, but characters with higher endurance can last significantly longer.

decide turn order with a luck roll, from highest to lowest.

each turn, players can move and make one action, which can be to attack, heal someone (if they’re a cleric), or use an ability.

by default, successful attacks from weapons deal 2 damage each. certain small weapons such as knives should deal 1 each.

to make an attack against another character, make a succeed/fail strength roll. if the roll is a success, the opposing character then chooses between defend, counter, or dodge.

if the opposing character chooses defend, they make an improve/worsen roll using their defend ability to either increase the damage by 1 or decrease it by 1.

if they choose counter, they make a succeed/fail roll using counter to respond to the attack with an attack of their own. note that you can’t counter a ranged weapon such as a bow with a non-ranged weapon such as a sword. characters can’t respond to counters, only to regular attacks.

if they choose dodge, they make a succeed/fail roll using dodge to avoid being hit and move to another nearby location.

if an attack roll is an 8 on both d8s, the attack deals double damage.

if a counter roll is an 8 on both d8s, the attack deals triple damage.

if a character has successfully challenged an opponent to attack them, attacking anyone else is a hard task; if a character has successfully challenged an opponent to not attack them, attacking them is a hard task. challenges wear off 2 rounds after use.

if a character has successfully blended, attacking them is hard.

characters can wear armor; if they do, the damage reduction for successfully defending is 2, but they can’t use the dodge ability, and countering is automatically a hard task. making an attack against an armored character is easy.

if a character would be reduced to 0 HP, they make a survive success/failure check. if they succeed, they instead go to 1 HP. if they fail, they go to 0 HP, and can attempt to make a survive check their next turn to go back up to 1 HP. if they fail that, though, they permanently die. characters can opt not to make a survive check when at 0 HP and let another player heal them. however, if they do this, and any damage is dealt to them before they are healed, they die.

a character with access to healing magic can heal another player for 3 HP by touching them. this has a cooldown of 1 round.

I haven’t playtested any of this at all, so it’s possible this is all deeply unbalanced; however, my intuition is that it doesn’t totally suck??? who knows though. notably, there’s no limit on how many times you can use the 3 responses, so a character who counters every single attack against them will be able to make a ton of attacks at the expense of taking lots of damage. similarly, an armored character can prevent a lot of damage since any successful defend will reduce the damage to 0, but they lose a lot of versatility and the opponent has a much easier time making attacks than they do defending against them.

[dmsideblog]

so this isn’t related to anything else on this blog or even directly to D&D itself, but this seems like a good place to put this, and it’s going to be a few more weeks before my group is able to meet again, so here’s this: I have a rough idea for a tabletop RPG system that’s designed to be both versatile and very easy to get into while still having a wide variety of options. so basically this system is designed around having 2d8 be the most common dice roll you’ll perform--a lot of systems use 2d6, and for instance D&D uses 1d20, but I feel like neither of those provide the right amount of variance that I want. also, the game is designed so that at the base level it’s relatively evenly balanced between combat-oriented games and social-oriented games, with an equal number of skills focusing on each.

players have 5 regular stats and 1 special stat--the special stat is the thing that makes a character unique, which I’ll get to below. the 5 regular stats are strength, endurance, intelligence, charisma, and luck. strength measures how proficient you are at performing physical tasks as well as combat capability; endurance measures how quick you are on your feet, how long you can keep going, and how hard you are to take down; intelligence measures your ability to notice things that are out of place and to deduce logical information from the world around you; charisma measures your ability to communicate effectively with others and convince others that your ideas are good; and luck measures how frequently unforeseen circumstances work in your favor.

players have 10 abilities, each of which is based on 2 of your stats, and each pair of 2 stats corresponds to 1 of the abilities. these abilities are defend (your ability to reduce damage from attacks--strength/endurance), navigate (your ability to safely navigate difficult and unknown terrain--strength/intelligence), challenge (your ability to convince others that they should or shouldn’t attack you--strength/charisma), counter (your ability to respond to attacks performed against you--strength/luck), dodge (your ability to avoid being hit by attacks altogether--endurance, intelligence), socialize (your ability to spend social time with others even when exhausted or injured--endurance, charisma), survive (your ability to avoid dying or being rendered unconscious due to physical trauma--endurance/luck), convince (your ability to make others believe you, even in situations where what you’re saying isn’t true--intelligence/charisma), discover (your ability to figure out information and find things beyond your regular capabilities--intelligence/luck), and blend (your ability to avoid attention from enemies and avoid being seen in crowds--charisma/luck).

players also have a special stat, and this is unique to each character. your special stat is something you specialize in, and it is also dependent on the style of play your campaign has and what the setting is like. this could be anything from political maneuvering to magical capability to quick calculation to combat prowess, or anything in between. it should probably be a fairly broad concept (for instance, “convincing people that education should receive more funding” is much more specific than “political maneuvering”, and “shooting fireballs at people” is much more specific than “magical capability”), although it doesn’t have to be, and it’s ultimately left up to the GM to figure out how specific this should be. for instance, “combat prowess” might not be specific enough, and something like “ranged weapons” is better. generally, though, each player should have roughly similarly specific special stats, though.

players have +3 special, and for their other 5 stats can choose between (+2, +1, 0, -1, -2), (+3, 0, -1, -1, -1), (+2, +1, -1, -1, -1), (+1, +1, +1, 0, -3), (+1, +1, 0, -1, -1), and (+1, +1, +1, -1, -2) for their other 5 stats, divided however they choose. these are applied directly to their abilities, so, for instance, a player with +2 strength and +1 luck will have +3 counter. the special stat is added to any 2 relevant abilities; it is up to the GM and the player to decide which abilities their special stat improves. for instance, the aforementioned player might have a knighthood special stat and decide that this applies to their counter ability; they would then have +6 counter.

certain tasks can either succeed or fail; certain tasks can either improve your situation, make it worse, or have no effect; and certain situations depend on how two people interact. when performing a check, if it’s something the player can only succeed or fail at, the player rolls 2d8 and adds or subtracts the relevant number for that stat or ability; if they roll an 11 or less, they fail the task, and if they roll a 12 or higher, they succeed at the task; if it’s something that improves or worsens a situation, the player rolls 2d8 and adds or subtracts the relevant number for that stat ability; if they roll a 6 or below, they fail the task; if they roll between a 7 and 10, they neither fail nor succeed at the task, and if they roll an 11 or higher, they succeed at the task. either a player or the GM can initiate an ability check, though it’s always up to the GM whether the player can perform the check. anything that falls outside of the scope of an ability should be decided using the most relevant stat.

if it’s dependent on an interaction between two people (either 1 player and 1 NPC or 2 players), the GM determines which stat or ability affects each person. if it’s a case where two people oppose each other and only one can succeed, whichever person gets the higher roll succeeds, and if it’s a case where two people must cooperate to accomplish a task, then determine which person (if any) has more influence on whether the task succeeds or fails, and that player rolls a success/failure roll; if that person succeeds on their roll, the task automatically succeeds; if they fail on their roll, the other person makes an improve/worsen roll, and if they roll improve, the task succeeds; if neither person has more influence on whether a task succeeds, then each person rolls an improve/worsen roll, and if a)either player rolls improve or b)both players roll no effect, the task succeeds.

additionally, if a roll uses a stat and another stat is relevant in some way to the task but isn’t the primary stat that would decide that task, the player may ask to roll the secondary stat into the first stat. the GM may also offer to let the player do this, but it’s never mandatory. to roll a stat into another stat, first roll the secondary stat. if you succeed, roll 3d8 for the primary stat and ignore the lowest number; if you fail, roll 3d8 for the primary stat and ignore the highest number; and if you neither succeed nor fail, just roll 2d8 like normal. note that for the secondary stat, you always roll an improve/worsen check regardless of what type of check the primary stat roll is. abilities cannot be rolled into each other.

for instance, if you’re riding on horseback and trying to attack another character with a sword as your character rides by, your primary stat will be strength, but you can argue that your luck determines whether the horse will reliably run exactly where you expect it to; in this case, if you have (for instance) -1 strength and +3 luck, you will roll 2d8 and add 3 for your luck, and if you succeed, you’ll roll 3d8, take the highest 2 numbers, and subtract 1. this allows players to use their specialties to improve their odds of success at the things they’re worse at.

there’s a lot of details that need to be filled in regarding things like determining your character’s HP, how to do things like make attacks, or how leveling works (or if the game has levels at all), but that’s the basic structure of the system, and while it has a lot of options and complexity, it’s basically all derived from just 5 stats and a few GM/player choices, and in theory, the game could be run like this without any further things added to it.

[dmsideblog]

so tonight was the fifth session and I ended up dropping the time travel reveal on my players much earlier than I had previously anticipated. so in the third session, they entered a tournament in the city they’re in, and they met several key characters in that tournament, and after the second round, one of the key NPCs sends them to a nearby drow forest to deliver a message. they’re accompanied by a drow cleric, who it turns out is scoping them out to learn their capabilities, because she’s in the tournament and is facing them next round. 

she’s not too tremendously overpowered on her own, but she has a huge amount of magical gear that gives her various boosts--8 magic rings, including one that increases her AC by 3, one that gives her 19 strength, one that gives her 19 constitution, a ring that gives her legendary actions (one of them costs one legendary action and restores 1d4+constitution modifier health, and the other costs 2 and lets her move 10 feet toward another creature and make a melee attack) and a ring of the ram. some of the other things she has include a staff of healing and demon armor. (most of her other gear is situational things that keep environmental dangers from being able to harm her)

so basically she was incredibly overpowered, and I anticipated that she would immediately beat the player characters, but they would continue on to the top 8 of the tournament and that between matches they would figure out the secret to beating her--namely, removing as much of her magical gear as possible. they figured that out early, though, and through a combination of several grapples, an unusually effective Tasha’s Hideous Laughter, and lots of Chill Touches to keep her from healing, they ended up removing a lot of her gear and beating her.

my intention was always that they would eventually beat her and then some outside force would kill her, and that the main villain for the whole campaign would resurrect her, so even though it turned out to be much earlier than anticipated, I had this happen here. however, this had the effect of throwing the whole tournament into chaos, because by all appearances, someone had assassinated one of the competitors, and it didn’t seem reasonable to leave the players in the dark for weeks of in-game time.

so I ended the session with the NPC who sent them to deliver the message to the drows--who has the time travel rod--sending them back in time to the point where the campaign began. I definitely wasn’t expecting the first time travel cycle to end this quickly, but it didn’t seem reasonable to do it any other way.

oh, also, they ended up implanting the ghost of a long-dead halfling in the body of a unicorn zombie and exploded the unicorn zombie’s head, so it’s basically a ghost zombie centaur now. that’s a whole other thing though!

[dmsideblog]

here’s some of the gods that exist! there’s other gods, because obviously this is a pretty small number, and in particular most of the other sentient races presumably have their own gods, but these are the ones I’ve developed so far:

Omnaïl -- human deity of spellcasting and artifice. Has two aspects--Peyatch, aspect of artifice, and Aïpeh, aspect of spellcasting. Generally worshiped by few, and those that do worship them tend to focus on the spellcasting aspect.

Arral -- dwarven goddess of beer and agriculture. While her followers pray to her for blessings on crops in general, it’s widely accepted as fact that her blessing is substantially stronger for any crops grown with the intention of using them to produce alcohol.

Drift -- elven god of love. While he has very devoted followers, those who don’t follow him often look down upon those who do, seeing him as being less a god of love and more a god of indiscriminate sexual frenzy. Rumors of Driftian temple orgies are just that, though--rumors.

La -- elven god of the hunt. La’s followers consider merely existing to be an act of worship as long as that existence is one of self sufficiency; spending months or years living in solitude and killing for survival is seen as meditative.

Erica -- human goddess of culture. Erica has only existed for the last ~50 years, and her followers consider the rapid expansion of society to be necessary and divine. Popular among bards and tradespeople in large cities whose lives depend on regularly interacting with others.

Ezran -- dwarven goddess of war. Her followers see participating in war as a necessary evil and as part of the natural order of things, though there are certainly those among her followers who revel in combat and see killing others as desirable and exciting.

Pholan -- orcish god of night. Pholan’s followers believe that the night is a source of mystery, and that the cover of darkness and lack of information is a good thing. His temples occupy the same spaces as Ekras’, but his take place in the caverns beneath, dimly lit and always quiet.

Ekras -- orcish goddess of day. Ekras’ followers are known for their loud, raucous celebrations. Orcs who favor war tend to be her followers, but her followers are actually best known for their lavish wedding parties which can last up to six months.

[dmsideblog]

here’s the story summary I wrote for the very first session:

the opening campaign hook will be recovering the remains of a son who was apparently murdered by a group of goblins and a family heirloom sword; he's being held in a goblin village, which the heroes must infiltrate. it'll be revealed at some point that somehow his consciousness was transferred to the body of a goblin, because the goblin was a wizard and he wanted magic and didn’t know that wizardry is learned and therefore wouldn’t transfer. He’s been held captive ever since because they don’t really know what to do with him.

I went into it assuming that the players would be pretty much ready to murder their way out of the situation, but the players ended up defying my expectations pretty heavily and only killed a very small handful of goblins who were direct threats and didn’t kill the kid. I decided pretty quickly that since the main villain is stuck in a time loop that normally the player characters end up slaughtering the goblins but that something changed this time around and they chose not to do that, and that all the unusual features of this particular instance of the time loop will be the result of that event.

in the third session, the players entered a tournament in the city they’re currently in, and in the fourth session, they fought a trio of goblins. I’m planning on revealing next time they interact with the goblins that the goblins are from the village that they went to in the first session; normally, the goblins end up assassinating one of them in retaliation, but instead this time they’ll be available as allies to them. I’ll probably post more about the goblins in the future, because they’re pretty neat too.

[dmsideblog]

here’s the original thing I wrote back when I was first devising my campaign setting; a lot of the minor details here have changed, and the players aren’t even close to uncovering most of this info (maybe they never will? we’ll see), but most of this is still true in the setting:

powerful wizard created 3 artifacts based on the circumstances surrounding her lover's death, who was lost at sea—ring of soul transference, rod of weather control, cloak of time travel. she sought to go back in time and use the items to prevent his death by hopefully ending the storm that he died in, or if that failed, by temporarily transferring him into the body of a long-lived sea creature. it's unknown what happened to her, and knowledge of these artifacts and how they connect to each other has been lost, and only a few select people even know of the existence of these.

what happened was this: after traveling back in time, it became clear that the rod was unstable and could only produce extreme weather effects, and the storm only magnified in power. through means she did not understand, all sea life around the boat had died, which meant that the plan to transfer his consciousness wouldn't work, and after a piece of debris from the raging storm struck him in the chest, she took a drastic measure and transferred his soul into her own body, so that both bodies shared one soul, and sent herself to another time; they had no idea where they would end up, and they ended up in the distant past. the tech she had originally used to create the artifacts did not yet exist—it relied on magical techniques that weren't possible because they were imbued with the power of a deity who did not yet exist named Omnaïl. the magical artifacts that do exist in the world at this point create small, localized effects, and nothing world-spanning or anything that permanently alters key facets of the those who use them is possible.

about once a decade, they take over someone else's body in order to stay young and gain more power to hopefully eventually be able to reverse all that's been done (the original two people were both humans, and even in non-human bodies, they tend to age at a rate comparable to humans); most of the time, they find people who are willing to share their consciousness in one unified body with the promise that a fix must surely be just around the corner, but occasionally, they've been forced to invade the body of an unwilling host. they now possess the consciousness of 14 different people over the course of around 200 years, with a handful of people who've just died rather than having a shared consciousness, and the ones who share this body are furious at the original host, whose exact name and identity have at this point been long forgotten. eventually, the majority of them decide to start actively sabotaging the plans set out by the primary host. they've also started referring to her as just “PH”, or Peyatch, and the refer to the rest of themselves as the involuntary passengers, or Aïpeh. the lover for whom all of this was done seems to now be a dormant personality.

Aïpeh’s sabotage leads them to the body of water where he died; they don't know the significance of this place, but they know that it's important to her for some reason, so they deliberately cast a series of powerful spells on it, killing all life in it. Aïpeh then deliberately loses the rod, planning on just letting the collective die. some time later, the collective is involuntarily sent back in time, and through some means becomes Omnaïl. they begrudgingly accept the fact that they've been forced into a time loop that ends in absolute failure, and that the consequences of not letting the time loop play out the way it's meant to can only result in disaster. only the most elite worshippers of Omnaïl know that they are composed of two warring sides, though it's impossible to say whether the original creator of the artifacts is one of the ones who knew that.

as you can see, it’s in a super rough form, and most of the specifics are pretty vague, but the campaign so far is pretty significantly based on details from this--the very first session was a self-contained mini-adventure based on the rod of soul transference (it became a rod! it’s possible all three of them will be rods) and the villain of the arc the rest of the sessions so far (and probably for a lot of sessions in the future) is stuck in a Groundhog Day-esque time loop with the rod (or not a rod????? I don’t know, buddy) and he’s basically trying to engineer a perfect run of the month that he’s stuck in where he gets everything he wants and gets out of the time loop at the end. I made one of the NPCs who the players immediately latched onto a cleric of Omnaïl so that he can slowly give them info about them.