Category Archives: RPGs

RPGs

Ray Harryhausen Skeletons

Leave a comment

I watched “Jason and the Argonauts” over the weekend. I made note that the skeletons were hard to kill. I had edged versus blunt weapons in the back of my mind as I watched the three men battle seven skeletons.

I can see how this would have influence Gary Gygax in his description of skeletons.

I wondered that since these were from hydra teeth if there were more than just mere animated dead, but somehow required a magic weapon to hit or something. I noticed that at least one had the skull knocked off and it appeared to go down, but it was not shown as staying down or not.

This gives me an idea for a twist on skeletons that may or may not be combined with a hydra’s teeth. I am not sure I will ever get to use such an idea, but it sounds like fun!

RPGs

Rule of 9’s

3 Comments

Way back when I was a volunteer firefighter/EMT.

During EMT training we learned about the “Rule of 9’s” that is used for estimating the percentage of body area that is burned. For an adult, the head is 9% each arm is 9%, the front of the torso is 18% and that back 18%, each leg is 18% and finally, the groin is 1%. One of my classmates said, “Nuh-uh! That’s 100%!!”.

I have wondered what utility this could be for use in RPG’s. It could be used for surface area hit by burning oil, acid, dragon breath, etc. However, would it be useful in to hit tables? I don’t want a totally realistic combat system, that would take forever for a single one on one fight.

I can see it used for a critical hits/fumbles table. I am not a math whiz and the best at designing such things, but it is an idea I wanted to write down for future exploration, and to get the idea out there in case someone else might be interested.

RPGs

D’OH!! Why didn’t I think of that?

2 Comments

I have been playing D&D since April of 1978.

Over the weekend I ran across a comment on a video that made a comment that  is so common sense that I took it as a critical fail vs. the clue stick.

It is so OBVIOUS! Why did I not think of that or have read it somewhere in the early days or have other players and DMs suggest it to me?

For spell casters on their character sheets next to the name of the spell(s) they have selected for the day, write the _PAGE NUMBER_ of the spell in the Player’s Handbook.

How simple is that? It saves having to make copies of the spells, write them out long hand, etc.

As a DM, I really should do this for NPCs. I should also note the page in the DMG that lists the DM’s notes on specific spells.

I don’t recall seeing any character sheets that suggest the page number of the spell.

I would also add a note to page of the “original” spell if it says, “This is the same as the Nth level Cleric spell….”

I’m going to have to make a spreadsheet of the spell lists for each class and level, and the page in the Player’s Handbook, Unearthed Arcana, Oriental Adventures, and the page in the DMG for the DM notes on PH spells, and notes/links to spells that are the “original”. This would be a handy index to have in print for players.

I think it is a good idea to make a note of the pages you use most, a custom index, to speed any need for reference to rules. For example, for player generation, note the pages in the DMG for secondary skill, height and weight.

For the DM, note the page in the Monster Manual for monsters in case you need more detail than the stat block. This would be better used when building an encounter deck or placing creatures in a location, but would be handy for a quick review of a creature the characters have not yet encountered, to make sure you don’t miss anything. For example, I read on a forum a few weeks back where some characters encountered a clay golem and the DM did not take note of the damage done being only healed by a 17th or higher level cleric. That would be an interesting side quest. Beat the golem, but have to find super cleric to heal you. A tenth level character stuck at 5 hit points would be interesting.

Now, to be fair, in the old days, for my spell casting characters, I went to the library and copied the pages with the spells and for magic-users, basically made a spell book via cut & paste/tape, so I had all the information in one place. Ten cents a copy back then was a lot of money, but I poured a lot more quarters into pong, space invaders, galaga, centipede, etc. When I didn’t have the money, I wrote out spell information in longhand.

The availability of rules books in PDF makes search easy, but not everyone can run a computer or tablet at the game table.

RPGs

OSR Superstar Initial Results Posted

1 Comment

Instead of the 16 who made the cut to round two, Tenkar has posted the seven who appear on two of the judges’ lists of 16 for each judge. Thirty-four more entries will be listed later. I believe he means tonight.

I did not make the list of seven, but perhaps one of my three entries made it to the other thirty-four.

If I don’t make the list, I will post the three items I submitted, and the creature I designed in anticipation.

I will then focus on wrapping up my A to Z blog posts, and then work on a submission for the One Page Dungeon Contest.

RPGs

Game Session – Riot!

Leave a comment

We had the second session of play while my youngest son was here over his spring break on Friday. My oldest son’s girlfriend joined us.

There was a lot of delays, etc. but finally got underway. The boys’ characters had amassed some wealth and spent a lot to fortify the house they bought in town and buy iron bound chests with high quality locks and lots of supplies.

Finally, all that was done and they were on their way to check out a kobold warren they had cleared a couple months ago in game time. On their way out of town, they passed their favorite tavern and a woman rushed in to report her husband missing. They agreed to look for her husband, and artist, who went south of town, the same direction they were heading, to get his pigments and stuff to make his paints.

They ran into a couple of plains lions going to their stronghold. The lions messed them up, but they killed one and drove off the other.The hilarious thing is that my youngest son’s character, Fan the elven fighter/magic-user had a barrel of beer in the wagon of supplies. The other two jumped off to fight the lions. His first effort at helping was to throw his empty beer mug at a lion, he rolled a 19 and hit it in the head. You can’t make this stuff up. We all had a great laugh at that!

They got to the former kobold stronghold and the men they hired to guard it were gone, as they had not returned to pay or resupply them for a couple weeks past their expected pay date. Thankfully, nothing had moved in. They locked two of the doors and the druid cast fire trap on the third.

They then continued looking for the artist. They found his trail and managed to find him on top of a rock surrounded by kobolds. They killed all but one, and charmed one, so now they have two charmed kobolds.

They got almost back to town and had a random encounter with a bombardier beetle, but I rolled that it had a positive reaction so it was just going to walk on by, but the druid decided to do speak with animals. It was fun playing a creature with no intelligence talking about food. He tried to get the beetle to to understand marks on the ground to try and figure out how many beetles were back in its burrow. I had to say, “Me no understand differential equations….” before they got that the beetle was not smart enough to understand. We had a good laugh at that.

They finally made it back to town and returned the artist to his family.

They got healed up, etc.

The next day, my youngest’s character goes looking for a guy who sells treasure maps. He went to the bar he is known to frequent, but he went in the evening and then bright and early the next day. The next day, upon not finding him, he offered ten gold pieces to whoever could find the buy. That cleared out the tavern. Word soon spread that someone had a bounty on the map seller’s head and there was basically a riot in town. I had to give a very non-obvious hint that a lie that the map seller had been found and the bounty paid finally calmed the people.

We ended play on that note.

One can never tell what will happen once you mix in a few players. We may see about trying to play with Google+ Hangouts and Roll20 to keep this going. It is definitely a LOT of fun!

RPGs

AD&D Campaign via Google+ and Roll20

2 Comments

I had my second experience with playing D&D via Google+ and Roll20.

We had 6 players plus our DM.

We played straight AD&D 1st Edition, except the missile weapon speeds are from second edition. Also OSRIC is available for reference.

Each player had a session with the DM to roll up a character and a backup character. The idea behind the backup character is to use it when the primary character is training, or otherwise incapacitated, or if they die we have a character ready to go.

With 7 people on the hangout, we disabled video to minimize bandwidth issues. We only used Roll20 for token placement of characters, initiative tracking, and dice rolling. I liked this as it minimized distractions and let us focus and develop the scenery in our minds. There is one more player who was unavailable last night.

This was much more my style of D&D. However, there were a lot of rules used that we ignored in our games way back when, as it added more complexity than we wanted. Weapon speed really changes the way of initiative. I recall reading something a while back about everyone using daggers for speed in a fight, now I know why. This added a newness to the game. There were some other rules that I don’t even remember them being there related to combat. I’m still not clear on some of them. I will have to re-read that bit.

Our DM has a well though out campaign area that is a sandbox. We are in an island chain and came from the backwaters to the largest island and its largest city. He described a harbor very well and gave a sense of all the sights, sounds, and smells.

My character has taken more hits than any other, three, so far, and the last knocked him to -2, but the cleric used cure light wounds before it was too late.

We had to stop mid-adventure due to time constraints for a mid-week game, but we are all looking forward to the next session.

I am off work this week, as my youngest is visting me over his spring break, so I took advantage of the 150 bonus XP to write up the session. I took notes as we went of names and things, so I had a very detailed session log that received a lot of positive comments.

We are using a Google+ community for the campaign. There are sections to organize the community for an RPG group: All posts, General Discussion, Resources, Session Summaries, General Experience Awards, A section for each players’ characters (so there are seven sections for those), and Events. This makes for a good way to organize things so everyone can easily follow along. Resources has links to documents via Google Drive for the pitch, campaign background, house rules, OSRIC, a fillable PDF character sheet, etc. Session Summaries is the place for the summary for each week’s session. Experience awards are where the DM list what experience the group has to split. The character session is where we each post the link to our character sheet PDFs on our own Google Drive accounts. The Events section is where each week’s session is scheduled.

One thing I learned from the Events, is that players that join the hangout from the event page don’t end up in the same place as those who click the join button the DM sends out. I am not sure why that is. I posted a note to help us avoid that next time. This was only the second hangout I ever participated in, so I am not sure what was up with that.

I learned more about the Roll 20 scripting and macros. This DM is more about getting us up to speed. I don’t like that each campaign requires re-coding every macro. One has to have a log in to use Roll20, is there an easier way to port dice macros to avoid re-creating the wheel with every campaign? That is something I am researching.

Other than getting the hand of Google+ and Roll20, which easily integrate, I think they are excellent tools for modelling roleplaying for geographically varied groups. We ended up with a group of people that seem to be on the same page and enjoy the style of play that AD&D embodies. We range in age from a 17 year old, my son’s age, to a near 50 year old, me. I am not sure of all the other ages, but most have played AD&D before and know the rules. Our 17 year old player is more familiar with newer versions and rolls to sense motive, and is liking that roleplaying aspect to figure things out. The majority of dice rolls were for initiative and combat.

I am looking forward to next Wednesday!!

RPGs

April, 2014 A to Z blogging challenge update

1 Comment

So far, there are 13 RPG related blogs in the challenge that I have identified.

Not everyone used the tag (GA) when they signed up, so I have been checking back everyday to scan the names, and if they sound like an RPG blog, I check them out.

There aren’t enough hours in the day to keep posting on my own blog, read those I follow, and inspect hundreds of blogs to make sure they are RPG blogs or not.

If I missed you, let me know, and I will add you to my list.