I spent most of my free time this past week combing through Jason Vey's Spellcraft and Swordplay.
A D&D offshoot, the game has a lot of marvelous ideas, but there is one little thing that especially stood out to me: A character's chance to hit is not determined by class and level, but rather by what weapon is being used against which armor. Class and level just give more attacks, not a greater chance to hit. "Armor Class" isn't a measure of an armor stat or anything like it is in every familiar D&D version... it's just a stand-in for armor type. It might as well be "Armor Class Plate," "Armor Class Chain," etc, instead of numbers. All of the monsters' attacks are assigned a weapon type as well, and their armor classes map to the same ACs the PCs use. This fixes the major goof of AD&D 1E - the weapon versus AC type charts are utterly useless when dealing with monsters instead of NPCs.
In addition to passing along errors I'd spotted, I also had a lot of game design questions (or "differences," or "suggestions," heh), and I started thinking of a way to use this with my other ideas I've had lately. I've never been entirely happy with D&D's combat mechanic, as I believe the abstraction of the system makes it impossible to say exactly what real actions are taking place until the final swing (really, you can roll a 20 to hit, roll maximum damage, and never actually touch the guy; it's just that his luck is running out)... and not only is it never considered this way during play, but the fact that missile fire is run the same way but isn't abstracted (one roll to-hit is one arrow fired)... ay ay ay. Vey's system doesn't solve "the missile weapon problem" but I do believe aids in making the abstracted combat system feel abstract.
But my mind began to work and twist, as it often does. Combine this with Wednesday's post, I scratched up some notes for a D&D-ish variant.
Standard six ability scores, using the BECMI penalty/bonus scheme. I can't figure out how to prevent Intelligence and Wisdom from being dump stats though (I have a ton of ideas about what to do about Charisma... been reading too much Dying Earth to leave it to die).
Four alignments:
Pious (character has been baptised), Heathen (character believes in a pantheon of anthropomorphic gods), Fae (believes "magic" is just part of nature), Infernal (character's soul is, justly or not, damned). Every character must pick an alignment, although animals have no alignment.
Each alignment will give it certain powers against supernatural elements of other alignments. A 0-level pious commoner could "turn" Odin, for example.
Three PC races: Human (the only things on Earth unable to sense the Fae), Elf (can not touch iron or steel, invisible to men), and Dwarf (unable to stand sunlight).
Three classes: Fighter, Spell-Caster, Outlaw. Magic is basic D&D-style, but spell-casters have completely different spell lists depending on their alignment, with absolutely no overlap ( Read and Detect Magic become class powers rather than spells)... and most of the damage-dealing combat spells go under the Infernal spell list...
Combat... taking the idea from S&S, but reconstructing the weapon-versus-AC table to greatly expand the weapons, include monster attack and armor types as unique entries (rather than calling a monster's bite a dagger or sword for purposes of the chart), re-doing all the actual chart numbers of course, and using a d20 (rather than 2d6 as S&S does). All damage and hit dice are d6s, as per OD&D. The first of a character's attacks that hits in a round does d6 damage, every additional attack that hits just increases the damage by one point. "Light" weapons roll 2d6 and take the lower number for damage, "heavy" weapons do the same but take the higher number (that from here).
This would mean that the entire monster roster would have to be re-written from scratch, and the weapons and armor on the equipment list need to be chosen carefully, and that's where the bulk of the detail and time would need to go. Otherwise though, the rest of the rules would be standard. The easy thing to do would be to just copy-and-paste large swaths of BFRPG or Labyrinth Lord, but even though they've declared pretty much all their text "Open Content," I bet I'd catch some shit for it. :D
So then there's the question of what to do with such a thing. The writer in me wants to design a setting as part of this idea to really hammer home what I intend the alignment system to mean as far as gameplay, but in all honesty it's a quick pastiche I came up with after reading a couple of books. The smart thing to do would be to just put the rules out there and let the referee make his own setting assumptions. This is a key point, as modern game design will point to the setting and the meaning of the rules as being the definition of the game itself, whereas traditional game design realizes that's too intrusive and the meaning is given through individual interpretation and game play by the local group, not the hoity-toity game designer. It's a pretty big divide, I think.
A D&D offshoot, the game has a lot of marvelous ideas, but there is one little thing that especially stood out to me: A character's chance to hit is not determined by class and level, but rather by what weapon is being used against which armor. Class and level just give more attacks, not a greater chance to hit. "Armor Class" isn't a measure of an armor stat or anything like it is in every familiar D&D version... it's just a stand-in for armor type. It might as well be "Armor Class Plate," "Armor Class Chain," etc, instead of numbers. All of the monsters' attacks are assigned a weapon type as well, and their armor classes map to the same ACs the PCs use. This fixes the major goof of AD&D 1E - the weapon versus AC type charts are utterly useless when dealing with monsters instead of NPCs.
In addition to passing along errors I'd spotted, I also had a lot of game design questions (or "differences," or "suggestions," heh), and I started thinking of a way to use this with my other ideas I've had lately. I've never been entirely happy with D&D's combat mechanic, as I believe the abstraction of the system makes it impossible to say exactly what real actions are taking place until the final swing (really, you can roll a 20 to hit, roll maximum damage, and never actually touch the guy; it's just that his luck is running out)... and not only is it never considered this way during play, but the fact that missile fire is run the same way but isn't abstracted (one roll to-hit is one arrow fired)... ay ay ay. Vey's system doesn't solve "the missile weapon problem" but I do believe aids in making the abstracted combat system feel abstract.
But my mind began to work and twist, as it often does. Combine this with Wednesday's post, I scratched up some notes for a D&D-ish variant.
Standard six ability scores, using the BECMI penalty/bonus scheme. I can't figure out how to prevent Intelligence and Wisdom from being dump stats though (I have a ton of ideas about what to do about Charisma... been reading too much Dying Earth to leave it to die).
Four alignments:
Pious (character has been baptised), Heathen (character believes in a pantheon of anthropomorphic gods), Fae (believes "magic" is just part of nature), Infernal (character's soul is, justly or not, damned). Every character must pick an alignment, although animals have no alignment.
Each alignment will give it certain powers against supernatural elements of other alignments. A 0-level pious commoner could "turn" Odin, for example.
Three PC races: Human (the only things on Earth unable to sense the Fae), Elf (can not touch iron or steel, invisible to men), and Dwarf (unable to stand sunlight).
Three classes: Fighter, Spell-Caster, Outlaw. Magic is basic D&D-style, but spell-casters have completely different spell lists depending on their alignment, with absolutely no overlap ( Read and Detect Magic become class powers rather than spells)... and most of the damage-dealing combat spells go under the Infernal spell list...
Combat... taking the idea from S&S, but reconstructing the weapon-versus-AC table to greatly expand the weapons, include monster attack and armor types as unique entries (rather than calling a monster's bite a dagger or sword for purposes of the chart), re-doing all the actual chart numbers of course, and using a d20 (rather than 2d6 as S&S does). All damage and hit dice are d6s, as per OD&D. The first of a character's attacks that hits in a round does d6 damage, every additional attack that hits just increases the damage by one point. "Light" weapons roll 2d6 and take the lower number for damage, "heavy" weapons do the same but take the higher number (that from here).
This would mean that the entire monster roster would have to be re-written from scratch, and the weapons and armor on the equipment list need to be chosen carefully, and that's where the bulk of the detail and time would need to go. Otherwise though, the rest of the rules would be standard. The easy thing to do would be to just copy-and-paste large swaths of BFRPG or Labyrinth Lord, but even though they've declared pretty much all their text "Open Content," I bet I'd catch some shit for it. :D
So then there's the question of what to do with such a thing. The writer in me wants to design a setting as part of this idea to really hammer home what I intend the alignment system to mean as far as gameplay, but in all honesty it's a quick pastiche I came up with after reading a couple of books. The smart thing to do would be to just put the rules out there and let the referee make his own setting assumptions. This is a key point, as modern game design will point to the setting and the meaning of the rules as being the definition of the game itself, whereas traditional game design realizes that's too intrusive and the meaning is given through individual interpretation and game play by the local group, not the hoity-toity game designer. It's a pretty big divide, I think.
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