Grumblings, Part the First: Hit points are an abstraction

When a character at my 2nd Edition S&P game does more than half an opponent's hit points in damage with a single blow from an edged weapon, the DM makes the NPC's system shock roll, then mentions that the blow is fatal but the guy's still fighting.  There aren't any adjustments to the way he fights, but the DM says something about how that NPC is gonna have to use one hand to hold his guts in.

Hit points are an abstraction.  They're luck, they're skill with your weapon, ability to dodge, grace of the gods, whatever.  You know that.  I know that.  The folks at my gaming group seem not to, however.

From the first edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide, page 61:

As has been detailed, hit points are not actually a measure of physical damage, by and large, as far as characters (and some other creatures as well) are concerned.  Therefore, the location of hits and the type of damage caused are not germane to them.  While this is not true with respect to most monsters, it is neither necessary nor particularly useful.

In the section on hit points on page 82, Gygax says,

It is quite unreasonable to assume that as a character gains levels of ability in his or her class that a corresponding gain in actual ability to sustain physical damage takes place.  It is preposterous to state such an assumption, for if we are to assume that a man is killed by a sword thrust which does 4 hit points of damage, we must similarly assume that a hero could, on the average, withstand five such thrusts before being slain!  Why then the increase in hit points?  Because these reflect both the actual physical ability of the character to withstand damage -- as indicated by constitution bonuses -- and a commensurate increase in such areas as skill in combat and similar life-or-death situations, the "sixth sense" which warns the individual of some otherwise unforeseen events, sheer luck, and the fantastic provisions of magical protections and/or divine protection.

In a game where combat is common, there needs to be a way to tell when a particular character falls in combat.  That doesn't mean that method has to reflect physical damage.  In the example above, the DM didn't change the way the guy was fighting.  The comment was more-or-less off-the-cuff, but it certainly reflects the beliefs of the other players: hit point damage is physical damage (to them).  I've played with them long enough I find myself asking how beat-up an opponent looks, just like the others sometimes do.  Pardon me whilst I mentally dopeslap myself.  It's one of several things I hope to unlearn as I continue to explore old-school gaming, the world of player agency, rules-light play, and sandboxing.

Memeage - the gaming shelf

James Maliszewski asked for pics of folks' gaming and/or writing shelves, so here's mine.  I spent about twenty minutes pruning it, as there were a handful of things out ('cos I was using them earlier and hadn't put them away) and a handful of things that didn't really belong there.  The top shelf is the stuff I use frequently, with the more  often-used items to the right, where they're closer to the desk.  The bottom shelf has other stuff I sometimes refer to as well as supplies like character sheets and grid or hex paper.

The green binder holds my Moldvay Basic and Expert books, and the Staples clamp binder has my important campaign stuff.  You know, for when I get that campaign started. Some time.  There's some 2nd Edition stuff there, too, but most of that lives in my gaming bag, which goes with me on Saturdays to the 2nd Ed Skills & Powers game.  Nngh.  It's gotta live somewhere.  And the Monstrous Manual has nice artwork.

James got me to post something!  Yay!  I have some ramblings and rantings stored away, awaiting editing and suchlike.

I long for the old days...

I'm getting annoyed with my gaming group again.  Well, let me be more specific.  Two things are annoying me about the gaming group.  One is that one person who's bound and determined to ruin any game that's not run to her exact specifications.  Can't do much about that except 1) ignore her, 2) quit going to the game.  I'm doing my best to do 1 right now.    The other thing is that I come to these moments where I'm just sick to death of the method of play at my gaming group.  It's not that it's bad.  The DM is great: a really nice guy who does what he can with the time he can dedicate to the game to come up with stuff for us to play every week.  I appreciate the work he does.  I just don't agree with all his rules.

I'm not going to open up a discussion/can o' worms about things like level limits or alignment behaviour.  But I heard from the DM this week that he gives human characters a +1 on any one stat when they're created, because, as he's not using level limits, he wants to give an incentive for players to choose humans, who don't have special abilities.

In my opinion, the game is about humans.  The original game.  The original idea.  Humans form the backbone of the civilised world.  The demi-humans form the fringes around it.  Dwarves want to stay in the mountain and mine.  Halflings want to stay in the shire and do halfling things.  Elves want to stay in the forests and frolic.  It's the oddballs of these races that come out to be player characters.  (And at the same time, I love humanoids as PCs.  In the setting I'm working on I'm replacing traditional demi-humans with animal men, who ought to operate by the same rule, but I'd love to see them get out into the world as PCs.  I'm so conflicted.)

Humans like to get into everything.  Humans are curious by nature.  We like to know what's over that next rise, or why this-or-that happened in such-and-such a way.  Humans are natural adventurers.  The other races, not so much.

I find myself longing for classic gaming, for the old days, for the Old School Revival kinds of games, the games that one annoying person at my game despise.  Roll 3d6, pick a class, buy armour and weapons and a pack and a torch or whatever, use less than one side of a piece of notebook paper, and we're off.   No split stats.  No NWPs.  No WPs.  No out-of-character spell lists that take several splatbooks to contain.  No pile of splatbooks that purport to give you more options but really restrict your options.  Ever tried making something really unique in Second Edition Skills  & Powers? I have.  I always run up against something that doesn't quite work.   Sometimes I think S&P is designed for people without imagination.  They want the game company to do all their thinkin' for them.

So I want to go back to those old days, before Tieflings (blech) and five-foot steps and Disadvantages and Character Points and all.  To that end, I have in my little brain the idea to run some short sessions of Moldvay/Mentzer D&D, possibly after the chaos of the holidays has passed and there are players available.  I'm feeling rather ranty tonight (no, REALLY?)  so I'll save the details for another post.

More Ghostbusters adaptation: Brownie/Fate/Luck/Hero Points

In the Ghostbusters game, Brownie Points serve four purposes: they allow you to increase the chances of success when you attempt something, you can spend them to save your butt if you're in over your head, you mark them off when you take damage, and you can turn them in to increase a Trait, so they're also kind of like experience points.  
Ghostbusters doesn't focus around physical combat, so marking off Brownie Points for damage works well there.  But how well will it work when combat is a more important part of the game?  Ghostbusters start with twenty Brownie Points.  I've never played the game for more than a few sessions concurrently, with the same characters, so I don't know how often advancement, or Trait increases, is liable to take place over a long period of time.  For a short-term game it shouldn't matter as much, but if you get into a heap of combat and run out of points, your chances of advancing are slim.


So another question that comes to mind is: how important is advancing your character?  Well, I expect it's going to depend at least in part on how difficult you make things.  With starting stats (12 points distributed over four Traits, none higher than four), the most dice you'll naturally get to roll is seven (if you're attempting something that falls under your Talent in a Trait with a score of 4).  Brownie Points notwithstanding, as every BP you throw lets you roll an extra die (and makes it a little less likely you'll be able to trade in thirty points for a Trait point later on).  With the Skull Die's six equalling zero, seven dice nets you a minimum of 7 and a maximum of 41.  Not  being much with the statistics I'm unsure of quite how to work out the most likely set of numbers from a roll like this, but the average value between 7 and 41 is 24.  Difficulties are unlikely to be higher than 20 unless you're trying to do something really hard (and probably suicidal) at least at early stages.  And again, it's hard to really track what the PCs' abilities will be because the players can spend Brownie Points to add a die.  So if the party thief wants to climb a particularly slippery and sheer cliff face to avoid Certain Doom (TM) in the form of a horrible, slobbering monster he woke up trying to steal the Gem of Unparallelled Beauty, he can always toss in a few extra Points to help ensure he won't fail (fickleness of the dice notwithstanding).  But the spending of Brownie Points will always be tempered by slower advancement.  I suppose that's the choice, then.  If you play it safe (and we're adventurers here: risk-taking is one of the prime requisites, is it not?), you may gain some Trait points more quickly than Mr. I'm Stealing The Biggest Treasure Guarded By The  Biggest Monster over there.  But he might wind up with the Biggest Treasure, while you've gained in ability, which serves to give you a better chance to gain some Big Treasure of your own later on.


So how important is advancement to your average player?  Is it possible to have fun and not become level twenty-seven billion in two months' play?  I think so.  But it still bears thinking about and discussing and testing.  Once I get this thing cobbled together I'll likely play out a mini  beta test on my own.  Just to see how many Brownie Points get spent in the course of exploring that weird old temple outside of town...

You characters got no class! Classlessness in the adapted Ghostbusters system

The GB system is classless -- in the original game all the PCs are Ghostbusters, 'nuff said. But you could build characters that lean toward some of the archetypes by putting points in appropriate Traits: Muscle/Strength for fighters (maybe also Moves/Dexterity if you're more acrobatic or swashbucklery), Brains/Intelligence for wizards or other scholarly types, Moves/Dexterity for thieves, and, well, I'm kinda down on clerics these days. Sorry, clerics, it's nothing personal. But a healer type could be cool, and if you sock some extra points into your Cool/Charisma Trait, you can calm panicking people or something. 
 
So rediscovering magic spells: maybe anybody can try to cast spells. Even Joe the Fighter, who has trouble remembering which end of the spear points at the bad guys (Brains/Int 1). Note that if Joe tries to cast even a Rank I spell, he's gonna have to nail it, 'cos with only one die you get to roll the Skull Die alone, and the most you can get on that is a 5. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should necessarily try. But this classless thing would eliminate the sometimes annoying effects caused by class abilities. Wizards can't wield swords, fighters can't spellcast, etc. Probably, as noted above, they oughtn't, as a spellcaster with a Muscle/Strength of 2 isn't going to be of much good in a fight with a six-pack of burly beastmen.

Spellcasting in the adapted Ghostbusters system

In the Ghostbusters system everything you try to do (beyond normal mundane things like tying your shoe -- unless you're playing a three-year-old) is given a difficulty number.  You roll the number of dice in the related Trait and try to equal or beat the number.  Why not so with spells?  So my spellcaster  has a Brains/Intelligence of 5.  Let's pretend I have a list of spells, divided into ranks by their relative power.  To steal some from D&D, a Magic Missile might be a Rank I spell, a Fireball a Rank III.  Just for a baseline test.  So I'll decide, at this early juncture, that Rank I spells are difficulty 5, Rank IIs are 10, and Rank IIIs are 15.  Now my spellcaster wants to cast Magic Missile.  Or: let's give it a different name like ... Arcane Bolt.  I dunno.  So I roll five dice, including the Ghost/Skull Die, and I get a 12, with a 4 on the Skull Die.  That's more than 5, so it's a success.  The spell goes off, and the nature of the spell means it automatically hits its target.  No Skull, so yay for me -- no complications or other things that will help my opponents.  But what if later I try a spell I barely know, or maybe one I've just learned recently from a musty old scroll I brought back from an adventure -- Claddadh's Thundering Inferno, a Rank III spell.  So my target number is 15.  Again, I roll four dice plus the Skull Die.
Uh-oh, I rolled a six on the Skull Die, which is the skull. It counts as zero and means I'm due for trouble, regardless of whether I succeed.  The rest of the dice total ... exactly 15.  Whew.  So, in the course of my first attempt to cast this probably ancient spell, I barely manage to keep it from burning out my cortex and instead it burns my enemies.  But wait: I rolled the Skull too.  The GM lets me know that the thundering ball of fire does indeed incinerate my degenerate foes, but also catches the old chest in the corner of the room, which, being it was actually an incredibly rare sculpture made of highly flammable but valuable material once used by some people who are all dead now, this probable archaeological treasure goes up in flames, destroying it and whatever nifty secrets it may have contained.



I think it's workable.

Reunbuilding the world, or, 'Teenage Mutant WHAT?!'

I was looking over my old posts, particularly the ones describing my process of building the Illi Pesch region in 12W.  I realise that I built way too much, for someone whose original idea was to run a sandbox campaign.  I thought, 'wouldn't it be nice to run something, on Google Plus or even in meatspace with a small group of players at a local cafe or something, with just the first handful of things I made?'

I got the notebook out and had a look and realised the first little empire I made is populated with -- please don't hit me -- anthropomorphic ducks.  The name 'Mallardo Empire' was pestering me so I decided they were ducks.  I have no idea.  In a way it's wonderfully whimsical, but really I want to do something that's predominately humanocentric, so why the heck did I make Teenage Mutant Ninja Medieval Ducks?  I love mutant animals, that's why.  Okay, mystery solved.  But I could just make them a human empire.  The writeup in my notebook, the fourth entry after three random little seed ideas/weird details I'd planned to use later, reads thusly:

The Mallardo Empire - small nation of Mallards, anthro Mallard ducks.  Fierce, proud, isolationist.  Emporer always called "The Mallardo", Empress "Mallarda".  Culture vaguely Spanish.  Conquistadors.

Somehow it seems wrong to just make them humans.  And of course my brain goes immediately down the 'it must make SENSE!' pathway, thinking of how maybe the world is populated with remnants of post-nuclear apocalyptic worlds and these ducks are mutant animals, if anyone of this technology level knew what a genetic mutant actually was.  Maybe they're the outgrowth of a weird failed/successful magical/scientific experiment.

But the old-schoolers would have it that it doesn't have to make sense.  And I have agreed with that.  And I like the idea of this being someplace that once had high tech but it went wrong and ate them or something and so now the world is coming back from being ruined or what-have-you.

Regardless, I'm revisiting the idea of running something based here, mutant ducks or no mutant ducks.  Of course, I'm also into the science fiction at the moment, probably a side-effect of my studies in maths and science.  Oh, how my detail-oriented mind goes for building solar systems!  More 'it must make SENSE!' than you can shake a nonsensical thing at.  But I'll discuss that at another time, I expect.   It is possible for me to grab the first strands of 12W and drop some characters in and shake it around and see what happens.  This can happen.  Or I will drop some characters into the rules-light, possible d6 system sci-fi setting I've been poking at and shake that.  Adventure is afoot!