Delay of Game
Due to circumstances beyond my control, I had to reschedule the session I’d had planned to playtest my mass-combat system. That will most likely post Saturday instead. The same circumstances prevented me from finishing my post about fantasy war. That one will probably be pushed back to after my review of the Player’s Handbook II. Which I expect to write in the next day or two.
So, no post today.
A Harvest of Men (III)
War Week continues! Yesterday I talked about some potential modifiers for the mass-battle system I’m working out. The bare bones of the system are in place, although the numbers might need some adjustment — the modifiers are still pretty tenuous, for instance. But the basic pieces are mostly there.
The main thing still missing is the effect of the PCs’ choices. Even if they’re soldiers pressed into service rather than an elite commando squad, they’re still the protagonists of the story. They should be able to make decisions that influence the outcome of the battle.
PC decisions
PCs have a few options to change their odds. (Major NPCs can also benefit from similar options, should the GM not choose to grant them plot immunity.)
First, a PC can expend a daily attack power to gain a +5 bonus to one d20 roll. This represents the PC using that power during one of the day’s battles. (The PC is assumed to use his at-will and encounter powers freely.) The PC can also use a daily item power or, with the GM’s permission (and some nice description) a daily utility power to gain this bonus. The PC can expend multiple powers on one roll if he likes, but the bonus is reduced by 1 each time, to a minimum additional bonus of +2.
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A Harvest of Men (II)
War Week continues! Yesterday I sketched out the basics of a d20 “war zone” system for determining the course of a large-scale battle, arriving at some tentative base numbers.
Of course, what’s D&D without some modifiers?
A lot of different things can affect the course of a battle. Trying to be exhaustively list modifiers is almost guaranteed to fail. Instead, I’ll try to consider the more likely occasions, and come up with guidelines that allow winging the more unlikely ones on the fly.
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War Week: A Harvest of Men
Back to some content. This month’s blog carnival is all about war. Appropriate; war or the threat of war makes a great plot element for just about any rpg, from fantasy to science fiction to espionage to superheroes. It also happens to be something many RPGs don’t have very solid rules for. They’re designed for conflicts on an individual scale, because the individual character is, from the player’s standpoint, what’s most important in most RPGs. But how do you handle those scenarios in which your player characters find themselves caught up in actual battle — conscripted into an army, perhaps, or leading the king’s knights against the encroaching goblin hordes?
The combat rules are usually unsuited to handling large-scale conflicts. The D&D Companion Set (and the Rules Cyclopedia) included the War Machine, a set of rules for mass conflicts, but many RPGs don’t. One way of handling this is to break a battle into a series of squad-level encounters — maybe the PCs’ squad is sent to disable a ballista, or to sneak into the enemy camp in the night and assassinate an officer. This does work very well when the characters are able to act as a relatively independent unit, and it works with both combat and noncombat encounters. (Check out The Core Mechanic’s Skill Challenges of War series for one take on handling some common war events as skill challenges.)
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What D&D Is (To Me)
Bookending my previous post, in which I speculated about what D&D means to different groups of players. I didn’t think this post was necessary, originally, but a comment by Brian Gleichman has convinced me otherwise. Tempting as it was to dismiss it, between the veiled insults and a self-evident failure on Brian’s part to read the page very carefully (in case any of the rest of you were wondering: I am not Ambrose Bierce, the renowned satirist who died in the early 20th century), I think it’s probably better addressed, because he raises at least one good point. I spent a fair amount of time talking about what I think D&D isn’t, but I left what I think it is mostly between the lines. It’s probably better to be clear, especially when making statements such as “the import of mechanics is limited.”
As an initial clarification, I’ll say: That’s not the same as “the rules don’t matter.” More on that in a little while, though.
What is D&D? To me, it isn’t any of those rules in my last post. It’s not 3d6 chargen, or 4d6, or point-buy. It’s not level draining, or lack thereof. It’s not wandering monsters and random treasure, or the absence of same. Those are just elements, and every one of them is dispensable. To re-use a metaphor I threw at Brian, they’re like team uniforms in baseball. It might (arguably) not be the Yankees without the pinstripes, but it’s still baseball. It might not be OD&D without level drains (at least, some people would say it wasn’t), but it’s still D&D.
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