Wounds & Damage Types

 Today I'm thinking about damage types and Wounds and Exhaustion and Stress.

Exhaustion and Stress we'll leave for another time.

Diegetically Derived Debuffs

So I'm kicking around the old thought-ball. Brain's on what happens when a character hits 0 HP. People complain about yoyoing dying characters back from the brink, Healing Word and all that, so... What if it really sucked to hit zero?

Other fixes I've seen impose Exhaustion, but as I said, we're leaving Exhaustion for a different day, except to say this:

5e has this nice little Exhaustion mechanic that kind of sucks to use. Like everything else about that system, it's expected to be a catch-all. An uncomplicated, barebones way to give player characters a debuff for exerting themselves or fighting the elements. It factors into the "exploration pillar" and doesn't really show up otherwise. But it does have a neat effect:

If you get 6 levels of Exhaustion, you die.

I like that.

So instead of Exhaustion, we'll take that rule and apply it to Wounds. Wounds are what happen when you hit 0 HP. You fall unconscious, you begin dying, and you roll a Wound. Get six: die.

Or, you would roll a Wound, if I weren't obsessed with making the fiction match the mechanics. Instead, I thought today I'd come up with narratively appropriate Wounds for each damage type. That way when your character hits zero from burning hands, it hits different than when you eat a glaive to the face. 

Treating Wounds is the concern of those proficient in Medicine. Herbalists and alchemists can make potions and supplies which aid in the care of the wounded, but patching someone up takes skill.

(I'm sick of the Medicine skill being a wasted investment in 5e.)

Once a Wound is treated, it remains on your character until healed but doesn't impose its debuff unless the Wound reopens, which can happen when you take a critical hit. Healing a Wound happens when you finish a long rest, but you can heal more than one if you receive medical care during that long rest.

Disclaimer: These aren't meant to be perfect representations of real life medical conditions. They're here to make almost dying suck and be meaningful.

Physical Damage

Bludgeoning

• Broken ribs. Your maximum Bulk is halved and you have disadvantage on attack rolls.
• Internal bleeding. If you move and use your Action in the same turn, you take 1d4 damage.
• Concussion. Any time you make an attack or are hit by an attack, there is a 1-in-10 chance that you fall unconscious for 1 minute or until roused.

Slashing

• Lame arm. One of your arms is nonfunctional and cannot be used to wield or manipulate anything.
• Hamstrung. Your movement speed is halved.
• Wicked gash. Any time you make an attack or are hit by an attack, there is a 1-in-6 chance that you begin to Bleed, as the condition.

Piercing

• Rattling Breath. You cannot Dash or use your Bonus Action.
• Bleeder. Every hour, save vs. DC 12 Constitution or take 1d4 damage.
• Septic. You have a fever and suffer 1d4 levels of Exhaustion which cannot be removed until your Wound is treated.

This is pretty good start. These suck! I wouldn't want to suffer any of them and I know my players wouldn't either. 

I wouldn't say I want risk averse player characters, but I do want cautious ones. These Wounds help reinforce that level of caution.

Do you remember? When we moved in September

 Today's post is gonna be short and sweet. We're moving and I need a minute to do something besides pack and binge podcasts.

Today I'm thinking about product accessibility in the ttrpg space. I'm musing about accessibility in textual editing, in conceptual explanations. How digestible is it?

It's on my mind because we've arrived at the last class for Broken Oaths: the wizard. So naturally I'm putting that off til I've moved because I can't be bothered to be creative when I've still got to dump a barrel of bad compost and a 26ft. truck is occupying my drive.

Instead I'm rereading the 5e PHB and comparing it with the One D&D playtest release and my own brain. Here's what I'm noticing:

• It's like 5e's PHB was slapped onto 25-40% too much paper. There's a lot of "dead space," where you could be using metatextual references or combining rules in logical groups. Not white space, dead space. Conceptually thin space.
• One D&D is drifting ever closer to AD&D and 4e. Remember kits, Complete Fighter? What about the primal, arcane, divine categories from 4e? Organizing classes by roles? Any of this sound familiar? But the conceptual density is good, it just isn't super organized. It's a playtest pdf, it gets a pass.
• They stole my ideas after I stole from 4e. Dicks.
• There's a lot of odd design choices that were made and then recontextualized via Jeremy Crawford's tweets. I don't love errata by social media, but I do think you should have a living document. What's the best way to do that for physical printings? 
• I think the best way is to sell a pdf with every physical purchase, with a serial number attached, where you can download free, errata'd copies of the book as they come out.
• Like unarmed strikes and melee weapon attacks? What a headache.
• Why do we talk about ability scores in Chapter One and then wait til CHAPTER SEVEN to tell players what they are? I absolutely hate flipping through the book. It makes understanding the book a chore, especially for the first go (and tbf, the ninth go, the twenty-fifth go...).
• Pro tip: Tell your players how to generate their ability scores in the same place you tell them what their ability scores are and do. Maybe with the character creation rules?
• I still don't like skills. I wish the list were different, but the way I'd change it requires combining Intelligence and Wisdom, and Constitution and Strength. 
• Also! The variant rule for using different ability scores with your skill proficiencies should be standard, not a variant.
• Physique, Intellect, Charisma, and Dexterity. That's all you need. 
• I think the Alexandrian has the right idea here. Tools should be skills. I like a juicier skill list than Justin, though. He recommends a 10-skill list; I like 15, with 10 profession skills.
• I don't love just one "persuasion" skill, because being a great at intimidation doesn't necessarily make you a good liar. I think it works, however, in a system/ group that emphasizes how you make your case and awards bonuses/penalties according to the situation. 5e doesn't do that, it makes everything chancy and random and oowoOOwowOOWWoo d20s!
• Sorry.
• Is it possible to organize class features by Class Type (i.e. Warriors, Spellcasters, Experts) and then have a 5-in-1 (I'm calling 5e/One D&D 5-in-1) game where players can select their abilities from the buffet as they level up? Might be neat.

Mostly musings. Mostly frustrations. The last thing I'll say is that I think the 5e PHB was never meant to be read. I would love to read it. I simply find it frustrating that I'm told to go here and turn to this chapter by page 3. Wouldn't it be great if, for the first 15 pages, I had everything I needed right there? You can restate rules later! You can even tell us when you're restating a rule. Have ability score descriptions in CHAPTER SEVEN(!) and drop a little note that you can also find those descriptions on pages 4-8. It's not hard. 

Put the money shot in the thumbnail.

Picking up where I left off.

 Three and a half years is a long time. Not for elves or giants, but in that time I experienced a plague, a handful of political catastrophes, and the birth of a new universe.

So let's talk about that last one.

Broken Oaths

Here we go.

In three years I've definitely matured. Tragedy and hardship have a way of doing that; changing a person. What they haven't changed is my affinity for purple prose. Expect lots.

I've also dropped nearly every roleplaying game idea I've ever had in exchange for two — maybe three — Big Ideas. The first one is Talamh, Broken Oaths, what have you. It's my hack of 5e and a setting bundled together, Patreon soon. It's hard not to feel despondent about one's obvious homogeneity when compared to titans of old-school blogging and new-school indie gaming. But yeah! Hell yeah! I'm making a setting and I'm going to release it and you're going to love it. Or it'll be another scream into the abyss and you won't care. Either way.

The other is my comfort food, my coffee on a rainy morning, my herb and funk music: Astrarius. A technicolor whirl of disco, drugs, and delinquent spacers set in a glitzy, 70s space-fantasy solar system. It fuckin' riffs, dude. 

This blog is about the first one. Astrarius will crop up from time to time when I need a palate cleanser, but for the majority of our time here you'll be subjugated to the incoherencies of a one-man design, playtesting, and review process. 

The chambers will echo with my delusions.

The blog will retain its earliest posts, too. They're pretty cringe now that I look back — I hate everything I've ever written for an audience — but to delete them would be denying that I've changed a lot of my opinions on running a game and designing a setting. I never want to forget that at one point in time, I legitimately cared about my players having a backstory. I will not be that person again.

To that effect, they're also great records of how a person's perception of what makes a game good, or fun, or entertaining, can shift.

Talamh

Talamh is a world out of time. In an age before humanity, two precursor peoples went to war and their conflict rent the continent of Talamh out of its homeworld and sent it hurtling into the murky beyond.

But now there are just the humans. Some ruins. And a whole lot of people trying very hard to screw each other over. The players of Broken Oaths get to wade hip-deep through all that history and grimy social conflict to carve a name, a home, a reputation for themselves. It's old-school mentality applied to modern gaming conventions. There are henchmen and retainers; there are strongholds; there are dungeons which, when their facades are peeled back, are big Jaquayed noodle piles full of resource attrition. 

I just know that every time I say those two words, Ben Milton shivers in delight. Here's to you, Ben, my treat: resource attrition. (And it's not just him, it's all of you, too.)

To further complicate the messaging, the whole of the Broken Oaths project hopes to engage players in my favorite style of play: emergent storytelling. Don't worry, it's free range and organic.

If I play my cards right, the overhauled character classes will be ten-level packages of mechanics and buttons which, when pushed, generated more interesting results than stacking bonuses or sources of advantage/disadvantage. I really love advantage but I fucking hate how dead 5e has beaten it. No, you get 5th level druid who can cast control weather as a ritual and fighters who have at-will maneuvers, no dice/usages per day. I really want to move away from uses per day as a mechanic for balancing the game.

And I really want to move away from giving any shits about balance.

The Patreon

I'll release more information soon. Right now I'm drumming up the old blog, dusting off the cobwebs, and shooing the crawling hands back into their receptacles. Also moving, which sucks and I hate.

But when it does arrive, it'll be a real bounty of options for those who wish to support the Broken Oaths project. And I'll have a much clearer "mission statement" for those who need a long-winded board room pitch to decide whether my intellectual labor is worth the price of a cheap gas station coffee each month.

That last bit, I beg you realize, was sarcasm. I am a slovenly whore for any amount of support. To be honest, I could do with some light buzz around the project, but I will work my tricks on the corners of the blogosphere day and night*.

*Note: The patient seems to exhibit "simp behavior," doubtless related to the lack of a paternal figure in the formative years of childhood.

Terror in the Low Magic Wilderness

So my players are actually insane. They have created something truly monstrous that I'm going to try and do justice...

We'll see.

This past Monday, I had a session in which my party found themselves facing down bandits. They fought them, killed most of them, and drove the archers into the woods. It was a trouncing victory that surprised me and them.

After we began to go over the loot in the camp, I pulled up a random trinket generator and had them roll a few times. The setting is rife with little oddities and magical trinkets, so three "common" magic items really doesn't inflate their power level by much. One item, however, immediately changed their low-level paradigm.

In a game where treasure generates XP and getting things out of dungeons and back to a sanctuary is a priority, an item which enables players to move heavy objects can be a huge boon. This particular item effectively gave the party two mules' worth of carrying capacity that they could use to haul one object. The item was a pair of carved wooden mule legs that were enchanted to follow the owner in loyal fashion, plodding along, hauling whatever the legs are attached to.

The second trinket of three was a jester's mask that the rogue tried on. She immediately provoked an attack from a party member who failed his Charisma save against the magical effect: attacking the wearer of the mask exactly once. The effect is constant, only works on a creature once, and only works if a creature can see the mask. I spitballed the DC at 11.

In the next ten minutes, my players designed the following horror from a decapitated head, the mule legs, and the mask. Though they didn't make it in the game, they came up with such a visceral image and way to use it, I couldn't resist writing up stats for the damn thing. One of my players even gave it this weird little panting noise it makes as it totters around following its owner. My wife had the most appalled look on her face the entire time. It will fuel my nightmares forever.

 I give you, the Terror Totter.


Terror Totter
small n. construct
ac 10
hp 18 (4d8)
speed 30 ft.
+2 Str. mod/+1 Wis. mod/+0 Con., Dex. mod/-4 Int., Cha. mod
saves Str. +4
damage resist non-magical bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing, and necrotic
immune charmed, deafened, exhaustion, frightened, paralyzed, petrified, and poisoned; poison and psychic damage
senses darkvision 60 ft., passive perception 11
languages ---
challenge 1/2

Antimagic Susceptibility as Animated Armor (MM 19)
Undead Fortitude as Zombie (MM 316)

Actions
Incite Rage. As an action, the Terror Totter can force every creature within 30 feet that can see it to make a DC 11 Charisma saving throw. If a creature fails, it must immediately use its reaction to make a ranged or melee weapon attack against the Terror Totter. If the creature is unarmed, it must immediately draw a melee or ranged weapon and use it to make the attack. Once a creature has been the subject of this effect, it is immune to it forever.

Bite. Melee weapon attack: +4 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 4 (1d4+2) piercing damage.

The Magic of Ordain

This will be one of two blog posts today. The second will be the promised statblock for a construct creature that my players dreamt up at my Monday night game. This post is going to be somewhat of a brainstorm for me, but also -- hopefully -- a resource for other Dungeon Masters wishing to use a restricted or "low" magic alternative to the spellcasters presented in the core rules of fifth edition.

In my current game, spellcasters must seek out 4th, 5th, and 6th-level spells from the world in order to learn them. No one learns spells of those levels automatically. If a cleric needs to learn Greater Restoration, they can go find a priest with a thigh bone relic from an ancient warrior-priestess and attune to it for several days (or weeks, or months, or whatever's appropriate to your game) and make some headway into the item. Essentially, I'm making all spells of those levels "researchable," using a modified downtime system. A player might need to take that aforementioned thigh bone to a pool of water on a holy mountain and bless it in the still waters under a moonless night. Whatever is tonally and mechanically appropriate and feasible for your game.

Spells of a higher level than 6th don't exist at all in the world where they can be sought out. They exist in dungeons. Your god won't grant you the power to cast Divine Word; you have to delve the sunken fortress of Malga'tir and find the site of the planetar angel Sierissala's final confrontation with the archpriest of Orcus. It's there that you find the word blasted into the stone where she smote him, and it's there that you must face down the shade of the angel, corrupted by necromantic power. So rather than being able to research for these more powerful spells, you have to earn them.

Consequently, some spells are unique in the world, and might only be known by one person. That means a druid seeking the means to earn Plane Shift might have to find and stop the plane-hopping elemental terrorist that destroyed her family's village when she was young, then rip the spell from the villain by way of some vitality transference, ritual sacrifice, talisman, or other suitably potent magic.

So the way I have spells set up is basically this:

• 1st-3rd: You learn these normally. This is what common people think of when they think of magic; flying, healing, shooting fire and lightning, etc. Villagers might have familiarity with some of these spells. A town healer knows how to alleviate a hangover or purify rotted food.
• 4th-6th: You have to research these spells and complete quests to earn them from people who keep them. This magic is known of and thought of as the pinnacle of high wizardry and arch-clerical ritual. Common folk won't have seen this magic, they'll have heard of it. A master arcanist with the Order of the Black can Geas princes and dukes into signing treaties for the good of the realm.
• 7th-9th: You must quest for these, and nobody can teach you these spells in the common way. They exist only in places of power and in the minds, relics, or artifacts of the most powerful spellcasters or otherworldly denizens. Commoners have never heard of these spells, or if they have, it's in fables and myths. Controlling the weather is the stuff of demigods, and the last time the druid Ourathore came out of her sea cave a hundred years ago, a storm sank the coastal city of Clifftop.

So that's my system for making magic meaningful. Normally, players choose spells when they level up. In this system, that freedom of choice is replaced with system and setting interaction. This is not a replacement for normal games; this is an idiosyncratic way that I've chosen to respond to my players and their desire for more challenging, meaningful spellcasting and magic in the world.