  |
 
|
 
|
|
To navigate the site, drag the menu bar wedged in the
left of the screen out to the right.
|
Nealok's AD&D rules hospital Vol. 3 Welcome back. I don't need no stinkin' intro, so let's just begin. Experience Bonuses (Yes I know it's boni.) Levels and experience. I like AD&D's level based system. I mean, it's the only one out there now, and criminy, it's what I started this whole RPG thing on, so I want to keep it. But balanced or sensible, it ain't. Nonetheless, I don't think the solution in the PO: S&P book is appropriate, i.e. try to make it completely skill-based and yet completely level-based at the same time; I don't like the idea of the salary cap imposed by limiting a characters ability to grow past x level. So I put some nooks and crannies in the rules without spoiling the overall flavor of the game. First, ability scores and how they play into level advancement. 10% XP bonus for 16+ in your primary attribute? Why? Being able to level a door with your pinky does not make you a fast learner of your skills by any means! Um, I would say Intelligence and Wisdom do, actually. So guess what, I have another one of my nifty calculations for you to use. Instead of any sort of 10% bonus (Get that out of your head), characters get a bonus equal to their (Wisdom + Intelligence + All Statistics Listed as Class Prerequisites)/ (How many Primary Attributes The Character Has + 2). Yes, this means all characters get XP bonuses (Hint: Lessen experience totals); round down. Balance, balance, balance. Also, I disagree with the idea that you can't advance in your ability scores by any means short of a wish! And while we're on the topic, why are the game designers so determined to stomp your scores down that you can't even raise any score a point above 16 without ten wishes? Is your muscle mass bound to your soul? The wild thing is that a psionic can go into your head and completely reforge your psyche, but he can't jack up your mental stats while he's in there! Does this make any sense? How do you explain this to players? My suggestion is that every level, players can add one (1) to any stat. But there are restrictions. When characters are first created, take note of the difference between all his stats and his racial maxima; don't allow the characters to add any more than half this number to any attribute score. To raise a score over 15, it takes two of the points given every level. I bet Gary Gygax is rolling in his...oh...he's alive. The following is a letter came Jack Pitsker in Dragon #261 (p. 19): "A 1st-level human fighter, given the maximum possible hit points of 14 , takes approximately two weeks to recover from a near death experience at a healing rate of 1 hit point per day. A 10th level figher who should be much more inured to such hardships and whose level of health and fitness should give him at least an equal healing rate to that of a first level fighter, would heal from a near-death experience much more slowly. At a conservative 60 hit points, that still two months of healing time. What could possibly explain this discrepancy? Perhaps the healing rate of any given character should be a ratio of maximum hit points to current level. So that same 10th level fighter with 60 hit points would heal at a rate of 6 hit points per day, being fully healed after ten days..." He goes on to whimsy about Con bonuses. I say add any Con bonuses to the number of hit points gained each day. Also, since you can get some pretty wacky fractions with this system, which I think is very, very clever, I remind that in the AD&D system, the constant rule is to round down. To sum up: (Total Possible HP) / (Character Level) + Con Bonus = HP regained with each day of rest. The AD&D Initiative system as it is written is a clumsy. blind, drunk, three-legged dog. I like combat in games. It adds the necessary lethality to the story and it feels good sometimes to have a character who can stomp his player's brains out like it was her second nature. In all RPGs that I have seen, the rules for combat are the most elaborate part of the game, sometimes by some distance (World of Darkness), and sometimes as just another swath of painful dice rolling (Shadowrun...decking is a bitch and a half.). This is necessary for the sake of fairness. Sometimes people do hit better than they normally would, or they hit the person in their one weak spot, or the bullet just doesn't do as much damage as it could. All of these things are realistic ramifications of any system. That said, combat sure does bog the hell out of a game. I had a Vampire game once when we spent half the four hour session role-playing, and the rest of the time in a midnight, new moon, woodland firefight. It was a damn cool fight, but I had written a lot more for that evening. I don't like underplaying any potent enemy's intelligence, and so I didn't want to give the battle to the players, especially because they could have very easily avoided the fight. So we had a combat session, which is not what role-playing games are about. Ladies and gentlemen (probably more of the latter), this was in a White Wolf game, a game where only one type of die is used! In my normal group, we don't use the normal AD&D mechanics. We: Roll 1d10, and take your weapon speed or spell initiative into account; the DM starts counting from 0 (which is when short swords of quickness, etc. go.); you declare your action on the roll result and it occurs on the sum of your roll and your weapon speed. We use initiative modifiers to modify the roll or the action timing, whichever seems appropriate, that is, when we actually have our shit together. This system is streamlined and if someone takes an action from the time that you announce yours, you can forfeit your action (to parry or block, say), or you can change yours easily by simply jacking up your action occurence time to, say, 45. Simpler than TSR, but not exactly grease on a burger. I recommend having a set Initiative number, similar to Twilight 2000 or Trinity. Take a combination of stats and call the resultant sum "Initiative." I recommend Dexterity + Wisdom, since those are the two things which I think would determine your Initiative success in any given fight. Your DM will then have all initiatives on hand (like any DM of Twilight or Trinity would), and ask people to decide their actions, from the highest initiative to the lowest. So the highest any normal character's initiative could naturally be is around 38. If a character wants to delay what action he takes, he can choose to act whenever he wants, but if he acts on the same initiative pass as another character is supposed to act, then he goes after the character who actually has that initiative pass. I would make exceptions to this rule for people with Short Swords of Quickness or Dexterities over 18 or some such things. As usual it is really up to the DM in question. Another option would be to sue Wisdom as Initiative and let Dexterity modify it, say +1 for every point over 12, signifying an effective combat sense enhanced by quick reflexes. I really like thieves. I think that they are the class who has the least chance of resorting to violence throughout their careers since they are never strong enough to take their equivalent level monsters and people out with force, so they have to solve problems by figuring out a way around them. Wizards start off like this, but they get soft in their old age, when they can kill anything they want and it takes a functional army to even approach them. That's why I like thieves, but their complete weakness doesn't make sense. I can comprehend why they are weak fighters; as many times as I've wanted to use the warrior's THAC0 chart when I've been caught doing something a little too sneaky, I get why they aren't martial psychopaths. But take a good hard look at the proficiencies for the Rogue class (p. 71, AD&D 2nd, Rev). These men who live by their wits and day-in, day-out, have to find the other way to go have proficiency totals like ass. There's not a lot to this. Give them more proficiency slots. Don't go crazy, but give them the edge over other classes in this area. Whatever you do to the Initial number of proficiencies, change the #Levels entry to 2. I recommend either maintaining the thief's three slots (since every other level is an awful lot) or moving it as high up as 5. Now the thief character can accrue enough skills that it makes sense that the character would be comfortable doing the weaponless work he is forced to do. Another nice thing about this proficiency bonus is that eventually you will have enough of the normal thief requisite proficiencies (tumbling, appraising, forgery, disguise) taken care of that you can focus on some of the more character forming, less common traits like heraldry or stonemasonry, things that the thief may have picked up but don't necessarily apply to the work of thieving. Besides the monster problems for my new combat system, I don't have anything planned for next time, although I'm sure I'll come up with something. Please contact me if you have something you use in your campaigns that you would like to share (with credit given, of course), or if you have a complaint about the system that you want addressed or revised in some way. Naturally, I recommend you do it yourself, but I do get a lot of enjoyment in rewriting the system, so I extend the offer. -N |