d20 Rethought: Hits and the Status Track

In d20 Rethought, hits represent different conditions that have a negative effect on a character's performance. These conditions can be due to poison, fatigue, physical injury, mental trauma or some other cause. There are many different kinds of hits, with different nasty side effects and criteria for removing them; what they have in common is that every single hit a character currently has moves them down a step on the status track.

In and of itself, the status track is an unabashed rip-off of the SWRPG Saga Edition's condition track- an escalating series of penalties. You from being fine to receiving a -1 penalty on all checks, then -2, -3, -5, -10 and finally unconsciousness. Six strikes and you're out.

Hit the jump for an outline of some specific hits and what this means for the system as a whole.

Lethal Hit: You receive a lethal hit each time you lose any amount of wound points. Whenever you take a physically strenuous action, you take damage equal to the number of lethal hits you have. Lethal hits do not go away; instead, they must be treated in order to be downgraded to subdual hits.
Subdual Hits: When you lose wound points due to subdual damage, you receive a subdual hit instead of a lethal one. Subdual hits have no special drawbacks; you can heal one per day with 6 hours of rest and two per day with constant rest. Proper medical attention doubles the payoff.
Shock Hit: Mental equivalent of a lethal hit. (You receive a shock hit each time you lose any amount of trauma points. Whenever you take a mentally strenuous action, you take mental damage equal to the number of shock hits you have. Shock hits do not go away; instead, they must be treated in order to be downgraded to stress hits.)
Stress Hits: Mental equivalent of a subdual hit. (When you lose trauma points due to stress damage, you receive a stress hit instead of a lethal one. Stress hits have no special drawbacks; you can heal one per day with 6 hours of rest and two per day with constant rest. Proper therapy doubles the payoff.)
Stun Hits: Stun hits last until the end of an encounter and have no special drawbacks.

All this has several effects on how d20 Rethought plays. The single most significant aspect is that when a PC is taken down, it will usually be due to having accumulated six hits on the Status Track and fallen unconscious. Dying by running out of wound points becomes a much more unlikely scenario, akin to death by massive damage in 3.X. Players now have a motive to avoid any sort of notable injury or mental trauma, even if they have plenty of wound/trauma points remaining. This system also makes it much more feasible to swap out mental and/or physical damage tracking in favor of damage saves, depending on the focus of the game. Picture it- an investigative horror game, with occasional violent conflicts covered only briefly with the focus instead being on keeping your trauma points high lest you start to crack under the pressure. With one quick variant d20 Rethought can handle this just as well as an action-oriented gunfighting game.

Next time, I'll likely be doing a review of all that's been posted regarding d20 Rethought's combat, and how it compares and contrasts to d20 3.X.

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Maelstrom: Preface

Maelstrom is a new setting I'm brainstorming, one that started as a series of suggestions for Mr. Skrittiblak's Elysium Nebula campaign. These suggestions were aimed at giving greater depth and originality to a setting that that on the surface is a space opera starring the cast of D&D. (My impressions is that about half the suggestions were of use to him; the background I had in mind only partly overlapped with the secrets of the background he'd already conceived.) Over the course of our discussions I realized that if you took this fledgling concept and stripped away most of the elements that were being taken from stock science fiction and fantasy, the background meant to justify the presence of those elements could instead lead me to something intriguingly original.

Of course, this also makes the resulting concept really hard to summarize. I have only myself to blame.

The best way I can put it is this: You know how Firefly was the wild west in space? Maelstrom's "____ in space" is the world of the 19th century as depicted in fiction. And not just modern works, but a range of fiction that extends past pulp magazines to include the famous authors of the time, such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Jules Verne. Picture a vast and diverse realm- you have hard-bitten settlers eking out a living on the frontier, ambitious scientists racing towards new discoveries (that could lead to triumph a la Tesla or tragedy a la Jekyll and Frankenstein), intrepid explorers who venture deep into unknown territory, and strange natives of unknown civilizations whose leaders wield mysterious powers. The "civilized world" has its intellectuals and industry as well as its fair share of armed conflicts and bogeymen in the shadows. Mysterious foreign empires are known through countless legends and a handful of firsthand accounts.

Take that all, and spread it out not between continents but between large numbers of moons surrounding four gas giants which all follow the same orbital path around their star. In this solar system the would-be vacuum of space is instead filled with Aethereal mists and populated by an ecosystem of strange and varied creatures. Space fills the roles of both the open frontier and the high seas, as towering starships sail past herdsmen on crystal-winged mounts.

I don't see Maelstrom as resembling the 19th century in any aesthetic way- the 'space cowboys', for example, wear goggles and breath masks while having no need for wide-brimmed hats. I'm just using the time period as a guideline for creating a believable world of mystery and adventure; a place where society is close enough to our own to be sympathetic and understandable, without having advanced enough for you to know whether the note on the map saying "here there be dragons" is true.

Make sense?

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Elysium Nebula: A brief anecdote.

If he hadn't noticed the cut power lines from the other side of the engine room, Keller would probably have strolled right into the assassin's blade. As is, the human mechanic had stopped in the doorway and thus had an instant for several thoughts to cross his mind as the black-clad figure stepped out from behind the generator and moved to close the distance between them.

The first thought caused feelings of frustration. After the last mysterious sabotage attempt, he'd spent a full day customizing and augmenting the ship's security systems, and assured his crewmates that no one would be able to hack this vessel like they had before. But he hadn't accounted for someone hacking the systems in a more literal fashion.

The second thought was more practical, and led to a surge of fear. Keller was no anthropologist, but his trading days had given him enough experience with elven culture to identify the oncoming figure's robes as the traditional garb of an adept. Which meant this mysterious enemy his group faced was in all likelihood a very dangerous one- and more to the point, so was the individual charging at him now. No one was more dangerous at close range than one of those martial mystics.

The third thought ran through his mind almost casually: Keller wondered if the attacker knew that he wasn't the only one in the have studied the eldritch arts.

As the figure rushed towards him, the human turned and bolted towards the toolkit he'd left open on the shelf yesterday, chanting under his breath. After all the hours spent juggling metal spheres without letting them touch his hands, it took only a moment for him to tap into the waiting current of power and send the arc welder hurtling across the room into his outstretched hand. He spun around and dropped into a crouch as the blade slashed through the air where his neck had been, thumbing the activation on the welder as he brought it down against the floor.

Even with his free arm held over his tightly shut eyes, the light given off by the welder as it scored along the metal floor was enough to blind him for several moments. But as his vision cleared, Keller was treated to the sight of his assailant staggering back and clutching at his face. And that's why you always wear a welding mask, kids. Never one to waste an opportunity, Keller lunged forwards.

The elf sliced the arc welder in half with a one-armed swing of his sword, eyes still closed. There were times when Keller really hated magic.

The tech backpedaled as the assassin stabbed at him, but by going for the welder he'd trapped himself in a dead end. Desperately he began to intone the ritual chants once more, this time focusing on the blade in the attacker's hands- as stupid a gamble as he'd ever had to make. His opponent probably had a lifetime of experience with using and countering tactics like these; an attempt to disarm him with telekenesis was doomed to fail.

Keller inhaled and made a forceful gesture, tugging the blade to the left. The adept reacted by tightening his grip on the sword, maintaining his hold even as Keller dropped the feint and pulled the blade in the opposite direction with all his strength. And because of this the elf was still in full contact with the blade as its tip plunged into the adjacent generator.

The human watched in amazement as his assailant was thrown bodily against the wall, the sword still wedged into the sparking generator. The smell of ozone and burned flesh rose in the air as the elf slumped over. Keller breathed a sigh of relief as he rose. "Well, I guess that tells us a little more about- OH, COME ON." The assassin was staggering to his feet. Keller took the sight in for a moment, then decided to retreat while he had the chance. Let's let the people on the crew with *guns* handle this.

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Strange Bedfellows: Red/White, Part 1

Blue: "You know what's wrong with Blue?" says Red to White. "They don't care. All those precious lives you seek to preserve, all those higher ideals you aspire to, blue is completely apathetic towards them."

Black: "You know what's wrong with Black?" says White to Red. "They don't care about how anyone feels, including themselves. Rather than doing what feels best they hurt themselves again and again, leading miserable lives because they think that just a little more power over others is going to make them feel happy. It's insane."

Red and White can both get behind a passionate dedication to a higher cause. They believe in something so strongly that they want to fight for it.

White: "You have gone astray in your fervor; your eagerness makes you impatient. The right way to achieve your ideals is through an ordered society." White rejects the words of its forefathers thusly: "Your faith in organized systems blinds you to how they violate the ideals on which they are founded!"

Red: "You have gone astray by becoming fascinated with the abstract. You want to know the key to being happy? Doing things that are fun, rather than putting it off because you worry that something wouldn't be 'fulfilling' enough." Red rejects the words of its forefathers thusly: "Real pleasure is the kind you earn, by working hard to do what your heart tells you is right. You can't imagine what it's like, because you've never tried it yourself."

Green: "If only you two could see," muses Green. "Your heart's in the right place and you'll fight so hard, but you have so little idea of how to achieve your goal. You fight the symptoms but have no conception of the underlying issues. You want to make the world a better place through destruction, to be a martyr for your cause even though you could do so much more for it if you took the time to ensure your own survival."

(As always, feedback is most definitely welcome.)

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Magic: Strange Bedfellows (Introduction)

Though I stopped playing Magic around the time that Torment came out, I still like to keep an eye on the game. And lately my interest in game design has led me to go back and read through a big chunk of Mark Rosewater's old columns. They're awesome. Also awesome is Ravnica, which I've always intended to take a close look at. But on an oddly discordant note, I find Mark's descriptions of the opposed-color matchups rather lacking. I keep feeling like there connections between the opposed colors that are being neglected, and as a result the pairings lack a coherent, sympathetic view; like trying to blend oil and water. In particular, his description of the Red-White outlook struck me as "these two don't work together, and they're in denial about it."

Now I just want to be ABSOLUTELY clear here. What I'm about to do, I do not do as a critic. This is not my attempt to show how things "should have been done"; that would require an in-depth knowledge of how said things were done, whereas I've actually put off my research into Ravnica so as to not make any deliberate attempts to be different.

So what is this dark deed I intend? I'm going to come up with my own ideas for what the opposed-color guilds in Ravnica should be like from a fluff perspective. Because as a designer I've had some ideas and it sounds like alot of fun.

Here's the creative approach I'll be taking: an examination of each color in the pie in relation to the guild in question, in the form of an ideological debate.
-First, I'll get my basic idea of the pairing via the two colors that are friends of one of the guild's origins. See, what happened there is that the guild's other origin color leaned in and, playing devil's advocate, whispered "You know what's wrong with them?" There are tensions between two allied colors that an enemy can appreciate.
-Second, their two origin colors, and how "purists" belonging to each of those colors think their brethren in the guild have been lead astray.
-Third, the color they're both friends with. I see this as the guild's blind spot, something they've overlooked and not given much thought to when they.

In my mind the advantage of the opposed-color guilds is that they've been more open-minded and thus realized that the world is more complex than most people think. And their weakness is that they've now lost that open-mindedness, that having come up with a more complex ideal they've seized onto it as the "true" right way despite the flaws it still retains.

At this point, my intent is take whatever concept I've arrived at for each pairing and briefly run to through Mark Rosewater's set of color questions so as to better clarify their outlook. There'll also be some musings on the form the in-world guild itself would take (rather than just the views of the color pairing) and the mechanics of the pairing.

Finally, I'll take a close look at what was actually done with that color pairing, comparing and contrasting it to my own. Value judgments will generally be avoided here, since we can assume my own versions will (through some strange coincidence) perfectly match my own personal preferences.

Well, here goes!

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d20 Rethought: Damage Done Different

I've talked alot about taking damage on this blog, but I really ought to also describe mention the differences in d20 Rethought regarding how damage is dealt. There have been some changes made here too, again in the name of streamlining character creation and ensuring that once an aspect of a character is optimized, it *stays* optimized.

-All damage is done through dice. In other words, to calculate damage you might roll 3d6 or 4d6+2d8 but never 3d6+1 or 3d6+5. The potential drawback with this decision is that rolling large handfuls of dice can slow down play, but this change paves the way for several other rules.
-The die caliber used depends on the source of the damage. A character might use a trick that grants him "2d sneak attack damage" or "+3d spell damage"; you inflict extra weapon damage dice on melee attacks equal to your brawn score.
-"Damage Resistance" minimizes the result of a die roll, while "Damage Vulnerability" maximizes it. A feat's tactic might give you Sneak Attack Resistance 2, a werewolf might have Total Silver Vulnerability (all dice are maximized), a red dragon might have a Fire Resistance and Cold Vulnerability of 5 each. . .of course, there are still some creatures that are flat-out immune to a certain type of damage.

And the single most vital alteration, the one that has some very far-reaching repercussions on the strategy of the game:
-The maximum number of damage dice you can inflict is equal to your attack roll minus the opponent's defense (minimum 1). Let's say I'm making an attack that deals 4d8 damage against an opponent with a defense of 15. If I roll a 15 or 16 on the attack check I inflict 1d8 damage; if I roll a 17 I inflict 2d8, if I roll an 18 I inflict 3d8 and if I get a result of 19 or higher I roll all 4d8 dice.

To help make said repercussions a little easier to understand, I'll toss in another big rule about d20 Rethought that I've only mentioned in passing until now:
-You can spend X vitality and X resolve to get a +X action bonus on your next skill check. (Action bonuses are applied after the result cap.) This can be done in or out of combat. It represents a moment of intense focus on your characters part; the sort of thing where afterwards you often slump back, take a deep breath and wipe the sweat from your brow.

Those are the big, obvious changes from a player's perspective. Read on for an exploration of these mechanic's potential and an explanation of how this business with dice ties into the underlying math of the system.

How this helps character optimization:
It lets damage scale smoothly as your character goes up in level and/or becomes more optimized in that area. Think about it- abilities that improve your damage are going to do so in one of two ways, either by granting more damage dice or improving the die caliber. Thanks to the "attack check-defense" limitation, the former improvement is only useful when your character scores a solid hit on the opponent (more on that below). The latter, meanwhile, is a permanent improvement! In this system, tricks can grant anyone sneak attack dice; a backstab-happy character just picks up more of these tricks, in combination with talents that improve the caliber of his sneak attack die to a d6 and then a d8. A straightforward melee fighter, meanwhile, might have tricks that grant him more weapon damage dice and improve his weapon die caliber via a Weapon Focus talent.

How this helps gameplay:
It's the same idea as the chance to augment your critical hits- the player has a choice, to play it safe or gamble by spending a resource for the chance to hit the enemy even harder. For every 1 point of damage prevention (physical and mental) you sacrifice, you'll potentially be inflicting another die of damage- unless you roll so high that you're already using all your damage dice, or you roll so low that you still don't hit at all.

This in turn makes Defense checks (Spending a move action to roll your defense, and using that result if it's higher that the normal "taking 10" score) a hell of a lot more important when fighting powerful opponents- an average of +5 to defense doesn't just mean an additional 25% of the rolls will miss, it means that your opponent will still potentially be rolling 5 less damage dice if they do hit.

I can take the number of damage dice inflicted, add that to their attack check and compare that against the victim's relevant passive skill check for an attack's secondary effects. In other words, whenever you've got a special trick that pins someone to their wall with their clothing or gouges them so painfully they're stunned for a second or just plain knocks them on their ass. . .the better the attack roll, the better it works.

In a similar fashion, when the players are fighting mooks/minions/minor npcs, the victims can simply make damage saves (DC 10+dice inflicted+1/2 largest die size) rather than the players actually having to roll damage.

My prediction/hope- and this is something that will require heavy playtesting for me to gauge whether I've been successful- is that combat will be a tense affair that can potentially be settled in just a few blows, while still being dramatic, fun, and in practice quite survivable by the player character.

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d20 Rethought: Skill Training

Today I'll be explaining how skill proficiencies work in d20 Rethought. I've mentioned before that skills work in a similar fashion to the Saga edition of the Star Wars Roleplaying Game (and thus to 4E as well). However, there's a little more to the story than that.

I've mentioned before that every d20 roll in the game will either be a skill check or an ability check (With one exception, but that's not relevant here). That ties into the first thing you need to know: Every type of skill check in d20 Rethought has a Proficiency Rank of one, two or three. This is roughly the equivalent of the "untrained" and "trained-only" labels in 3.X, with a middle ground:

-Proficiency Rank I applications of a skill are the "normal" skill checks, and can benefit from all relevant bonuses.

-Proficiency Rank II applications of a skill are made as ability checks, meaning they can only benefit from the character's ability score, an expenditure of Action Points (kinda-sorta, that's something else I haven't gotten into) and/or any relevant circumstance bonuses.

-Proficiency Rank III means your character is incapable of making this type of skill check.

Training can reduce a check's effective proficiency rank, making it usable. The d20 Rethought equivalent of becoming "trained" in a skill is handled entirely via three feats:

Basic Training (skillname) gives me a +2 bonus on all applications of a skill and lets me treat PR II and III checks as being one proficiency rank lower.

Specialized Training (skillname) gives me a +4 bonus on *one* application of a skill and lets me treat it as PR I.

Advanced Training (skillname), which requires one of the above feats (but not both), replaces these benefits with a +4 bonus on *all* application of a skill while letting me treat them all as PR I.

Make sense? I'll try to have an example up soon.

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