Gelatinous Icosahedron

 It's always bothered me a little bit that falling damage in D&D is something that can be withstood by having more hit points. Sword blows, sure; hit points represent the skill and combat reflexes to turn potential killing strokes into glancing blows and superficial wounds. Arrows are a little trickier, but it's still possible to envision saving oneself from a shot to the heart with honed instincts and conditioned reflexes. Falling, though... gravity and inertia don't give a flying fork about how good a warrior you are. We all fall at 9.8 meters per second squared. There's a certain limit within which it's conceivable that a nimble and trained person can control his landing so as to distribute the force of impact to minimize injury, but if you're falling 50 feet, it's much less likely to make a difference whether you land gracefully or awkwardly. It's possible to model something a bit more "realistic" without abandoning the essential 1d6-pe...

 Combat offense in D&D is modeled with attack rolls, using d20, modified by class and level plus ability score modifiers or by creature Hit Dice, in either case representing some combination of skill and physical power, and by a damage roll, generally representing the amount of force brought to bear on a successful attack. It can be a wonky system, and sometimes counter to our intuitions of how combat and bodily injury actually work, but it serves its purpose well enough in the game. Defense in D&D combat can be even wonkier and less intuitively satisfying. Like offense, it's broken down into two primary components, Armor Class and hit points. Both, conceptually, serve the same broad function, which is to represent the avoidance or reduction in severity of bodily injury, but they do so in ways which are mathematically distinct and very different intuitively.  Armor Class is the more intuitively comprehensible of the two, though it itself represents two semi-distinct co...

 In a recent post about things I like and don't like about B/X D&D, I mentioned in passing that I don't see initiative as a strictly necessary rule in D&D combat. Another blogger has suggested I expand on that thought, and so in this post, I articulate my case for why initiative is not a necessary component of a functional D&D combat sequence. Initiative, as I see it, can be a useful tool to impart some order and structure to combat. Insofar as it models any aspect of real combat in the game, though, it doesn't do it particularly well. Maybe not particularly badly either, but it's a simplistic and formalized rule for a very chaotic and unpredictable situation. Depending on particular circumstances and how one rationalizes it, it can either make sense or defy sense. It implies that whoever has initiative, if his attack roll succeeds, does all his damage before his opponent can attack in return, so the opponent might be killed before he can even attempt his ow...

When it comes to fighting without weapons, D&D tends to go a bit insane. Besides often coming out overly fiddly and complex, subsystems for unarmed combat tend to mesh very poorly with the standard (armed) combat rules. Game designers, it seems, have tried to model a set of Hollywood fight tropes which don't fit well with the abstractions and assumptions of D&D combat. Consider, for instance, the ever-popular notion of knocking out an opponent with a single punch. In a game where clubs and maces can only whittle away the opponent's hit points, a rule allowing knockout punches produces results that are often counterintuitive, if not outright ridiculous.  I've made my own attempts on more than one occasion to construct a set of viable grappling/unarmed combat rules, but now I'm coming at it from a very different angle. The main problems with unarmed combat subsystems are A) treating armed and unarmed combat as fundamentally distinct from each other when in most re...

 The D&D wilderness encounter tables are a hot mess. That's the message from Eric Diaz at Methods & Madness , and he's absolutely right. It's a subject I've pondered a lot over the years, and I have some thoughts on the matter too.  The post linked above covers the problem quite well, and I'd encourage you to read it. In brief, the tables are both wildly dangerous to adventuring parties, featuring ridiculous frequency of very powerful creatures such as dragons, and the encounters often aren't even terrain-appropriate. My own two cents' worth in the comments was that many of the encounters end up being utterly pointless as well, such as sea snakes on shipborne adventures. The next step in finding a solution is to identify what we'd like to see.  Do we want random wilderness encounters at all? I'd argue that yes, we do, because hex crawls almost by nature consist of large swathes of unkeyed territory with nothing but a terrain symbol in the ce...

 Taking a break from the Monsters A to Z for some pondering on what you can do with some new old-school friendly combat mechanics. One of the strongest signs that Old School gaming is not simply about nostalgia is the extent to which old schoolers have embraced ascending Armor Class, in conjunction with class-based attack bonuses, over the old descending-AC-and-attack matrix or THAC0 system. It doesn't just streamline the math and eliminate a whole layer of fiddliness, though, as much as those effects are to be hailed. Within the ascending AC and attack bonus framework, you can do some pretty cool things that would have required some real mental gymnastics in the traditional system. The magic of this approach really lies in the use of an attack bonus stat rather than lines and columns in an attack matrix, which allows everyone to use the same target number for the same target.  To illustrate the point a bit more clearly, consider a 5th-level fighter and a 1st-level magic-user ...

 When it comes to doing better in combat, there are a few ways a character or monster's battle effectiveness can be scaled up. For purposes of this post, I'm talking about the character or creature's actual inherent combat effectiveness and improvements in combat ability from gaining levels of experience, not bonuses from magical weapons and the like. Better attack rolls: The character "hits" more often. Each 1 point of attack bonus or decrease in THAC0 results in 5% greater average damage per round. The average damage per successful attack and the maximum possible damage in a round are unchanged. This is how it works for all characters in B/X D&D. More damage: Damage per successful attack is augmented, either by adding a flat number or by increasing the size or number of dice rolled for each attack. The chance to succeed at an attack is not affected. This method is used in BECMI's Weapon Mastery rules and to a lesser degree in AD&D's weapon spec...

 Everybody has an opinion on the so-called Vancian casting system of classic D&D. Some (myself among them) find the idea of "fire-and-forget" spells to be a poor representation of the kind of fiction we want to represent. Some (again, including myself) find it too rigid, and dislike the incentives it provides toward spell selection. And then there are those on the other side of the fence, who like the in-fiction implications (still not a fan) or who see value in such a system for the purpose of promoting game elements of resource management and player skill (for which I do have an appreciation.)  Not a whole lot need be said about the in-universe implications of spell preparation. It could literally be a case of impressing patterns of magical energy (or imprisoning a minor daemon or other entity) in the mind and then discharging it, losing the pattern or knowledge until it is prepared again) but it could just as easily be reskinned as carefully preparing proper reagen...

 D&D needs experience points to truly and fully be a game in which player skill and choices matter. Rewarding skillful play and avoiding the subjectivity of DM fiat as much as possible make for a more rewarding gaming experience. But simply having an XP mechanic is not enough -- experience point awards must incentivize the right things to maximize the range of player choice and properly recognize its results. (What's "right" is a matter of debate, but DMs should at least be fully cognizant of what actions their XP systems encourage and discourage.) XP awards can be broken down into two broad categories: XP for accomplishments and XP for actions. The former is about broad objectives, with little or no regard for the strategies and methods used to accomplish it. XP for treasure is one prominent example. It doesn't matter whether the PC party gets loot by combat, by exploration and searching, by stealth, by negotiation and diplomacy, or by some combination of all. S...

 A while back, I posted on the old blog about a system to assign dispositions to NPCs and adjust their reaction rolls. As so often happens, my original idea was more complex than it needed to be, and would have benefited a lot from paring down and streamlining. More recently, I was pondering how to differentiate monsters without using the traditional D&D alignment system, which is fraught with various issues and has fallen out of favor with some players and DMs, including myself. It occurred to me I could repurpose that old idea to fill the gap. The gist of it is that, instead of an alignment, each monster type, and if desired, NPCs, is assigned one of the following dispositions, which affects its reaction rolls in a particular way. Average : The creature has no strong tendencies, and makes an unmodified reaction roll.  Benign : Generally seeking to avoid conflict; agreeable or meek. +1 to reaction rolls. Antagonistic : Inclined toward anger or hostility. -1 to reaction r...