I tend to pick up video games after they've been out for a while. For example, I bought Mass Effect during a sale a month or so ago. I haven't gotten around to playing it yet.
This post isn't about games I haven't played. It is, unsurprisingly, about Fallout 3. I have recently begun replaying the game with my wife, which act consists of me playing the game while letting her make the decisions. (This arrangement quickly led to different choices, as she directed me to kill the Overseer with a baseball bat on our exit from Vault 101.) So far, across 10 levels of gameplay, she's sent me in pursuit of every quest except the main storyline, which has served to highlight the free exploration that is such an integral part of the game design.
These tidbits - finding the Dunwich building full of feral ghouls and a Lovecraft-esque mystery, finding the woman who broadcasts her violin playing over the radio, finding the crazy lady who covets all things Nuka-Cola and the man who wants to get into her pants, finding the surgeon implanting control chips in ghouls - these all make me yearn for a bit of a sandbox game. The sort of game I haven't played in some time, because my players have wanted plots attached to their characters and I've had some fun concocting grand schemes for the players to meet and derail completely.
That's a good time, and it's been the good time I've been playing for over 10 years. But I'm feeling the urge for some good old sandbox - a small map with a couple dozen locations sketched out, where players can go and make their own trouble without waiting for me to dangle a hook in front of them. Despite some trying, it's been difficult to incorporate this into my current game because everything ends up seeming connected to the core plot - when not by my design, by the players' inference.
Now I feel like I'm whining about my game, which isn't the point. The point is that I'm feeling too plot-heavy and I'd like to mess around with some sandbox gaming - but I'm not sure when I'll have the chance to do so. Woe is me.
I ran a couple games of Gamma World for my home group during the playtesting phase, and we had a blast. We had to set them up for swift access to the largest volume of rules, so each character started at level 1 and leveled up after each encounter, finshing the night at level 4.
The characters my players rolled up for the first week were Herrrtz, an electrokinetic felinoid (Lane); Texaco, the hypercognitive speedster (Mike); and Pinkeye, the radioactive mind coercer (Doug). The lot of them had been enslaved by froggers (the bullywug minis I had to hand) and, after some rudimentary spirit-breaking, were being trained for gladiatorial combat.
Arming the PCs is always a bad idea. After ripping their captors new ones, they were waylaid by spider-people (driders) in the woods on the way back to the slaver camp, which killed Herrrtz.
Lane had a new character ready for the next encounter: Reginald, the seismic yeti, who seemed nigh unstoppable as he joined the other two PCs for an assault on the frogger slave bosses. One highlight is when one (I think Texaco) surrounded the rocket-launcher-wielding frogger with an invisible forcefield, so the enemy's next shot sent him and his backup rockets up like an exploding chimney.
The next week, we had more players, so they all made new characters. I set the game in Slave City, the community of 150 that sprang up after last week's characters freed the frogger's slaves. This week's PCs were Lucius Clay, another yeti and grandchild of the famous Reginald (Lane); Curt Steel, android supacop (Mark); the Rats of Nimh (Mike); Katzensturmbandfuhrer Wolfgang Sanchez, a genetic experiment leftover from the 1940s (Paul); and Neutron Bum, the radioactive layabout (Doug).
They backtracked an assault of scalemen (lizardfolk again scavenged from my minis box) to the source, which turned out to be the founders of Slave City and their characters from the previous week, all juiced up on some weird life-lengthening, megalomaniacizing radiation and headquartered in an old post office. The new guys put down their forebears, of course. One highlight might be when Neutron Bum (I think) created a gravity well in the middle of a ravine, pulling the scalemen ambush (and some of his allies) into the middle of the space where everyone got into a frenetic scrum.
It was fun playtesting and all, but I really look forward to when we have some nice character sheets and cards.
Part of me wants this be an enormous post with detailed ideas on how to further abstract combat, but I don't have the time I wish I did and I'm sure it needs to be enormous - part of the appeal is that it isn't that hard.
Abstract(er) Combat in D&D
Okay, so combat is already pretty abstract. (What are hit points, anyway? Go read about 500,000 posts on the subject to not find out.) Armor decides whether you get "hit," not whether you get "hurt." And so it goes.
The minor change on my mind is to replace hit points with simple "hits." When a PC hits a monster, the DM records a hit against that monster. With the fifth hit against a monster, the PC gets to decide what happens to that monster - the mage's lightning fries it to a crisp, the fighter knocks it out cold, or the rogue sneaks up behind it and pushes it off the cliff to its inevitable death. (Minions still require only one hit.)
But up until that point, the PCs cannot do any of those things. Hits are narrated as near-misses, claiming the advantage, setting up an ally for a devastating attack, or forcing the target on the defensive. (Really, saying "cannot" is being too restrictive; minor cuts and scrapes are par for the course.) But pushing a full-hp villain over a cliff, a valid tactic in vanilla D&D, is a no-no in this more narrative version. You might force Duke Steel Hills to the edge of the parapet, but you can't force him to fall until you've earned it.
Likewise, PCs record hits against their characters. They can take three hits, fewer than monsters do (because monsters are monstrous), and maybe more of those hits are described as physical damage. It's hard to be sure without knowing the members of the party - a cleric heals away physical damage, but a warlord shouts encouragement or tactical advice to eliminate disadvantage. That could be a point of mechanical distinction between leaders. Hm. The cleric heals wounds with the blessings of the gods, so he or she can heal someone with only 1 or fewer hits left. The warlord eliminates tactical disadvantage, so can aid someone with 1 or greater hits left. The bard bolsters people ahead of time, so allies nearby gain +1 hit. The shaman... feels pretty like the cleric in this regard. For now.
Powers need adjustment. Some powers need to do extra hits, or all powers need to have interesting secondary effects in addition to dealing a hit. Battlefield movement is always good. Multi-target attacks become significantly better in this arrangement and need some form of modification - as an off-the-cuff patch, an area burst might only take away one target's "hit," but deal secondary effects to all the targets hits.
At its genesis, this skill-challenge-esque form of combat had, in my head, a tug-of-war mechanic for who is winning. Each side wanted to get to a certain number of successes or hits over their enemies, not striving for a flat number, but for a certain degree of advantage. It doesn't work well when we're tracking hits on multiple targets, though.
1) What historical figure would you go back in time to introduce to D&D, and why? What do you think introducing that figure to D&D will change? (I find it best to consider changes to the world rather than to the game.)
2) Create a table of you and 5 persons of note from across history to play D&D together. What role does each of you play at the table?
Examples
1 - Napoleon. By giving him another tactical game on which to hone his skills, I grant him success in his endeavor of conquering the world. But I have to buff hobbits.
2 - Benjamin Franklin DMs. Meriwether Lewis leads the party as a ranger. William Thompson, for whom the term "confidence man" was coined, plays the charismatic rogue. Jerry Siegel plays the paladin, while Stan Lee changes his character every week. I play a wizard.
