I know the advantage/disadvantage reroll thing is hot these days but I’m forever a fan of the granularity of stacking situational bonuses with +2s and -2s being the default number. I feel like it lets the players do more detailed problem solving and in a group, if different players have different overlapping ways of adding to an effort it lets you reflect that.
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Is it hot? I just thought it was a cool way to represent a positional/situational advantage. It’s here and gone turn to turn and there’s no “ok how many +2s do i add to 17?”. It’s just… you got a huge bonus because you coordinated with your buddies or not.
Tbh I really love getting groups to work together, and it’s one of the main design goals. I have all my PCs act together, but on top of it, I encourage intermingling moving/attacking to get into advantageous positions. I think that’s sort of like Baldur’s Gate 3, but it’s much more predictable turn groupings and higher impact because I don’t have the patience to handle initiatives for 10+ PCs and NPCs. It’s just PC turn and NPC turn reroll initiative repeat.
How do you do coordination? I’m interested in seeing how other people do it before I send my baby out into the world.
I’m thinking more in a non combat sense (although I do do individual initiative). If it’s something that shouldn’t resolved just by talking it out. It’s the difference between two people trying to hold a door from getting forced open and four people while someone is trying to grease the floor under the intruders. If the second person helping nets the roll advantage why keep thinking of solutions beyond that?
And it seems like 5e popularized it but I’ve been seeing it pop up in light rules sets since.
It depends on the situation but a lot of times advantage is shared.
E.g flanking rules if a group of characters is surrounded by a group of characters twice as large then they’re attacked at an advantage.
So if one person advances on a single enemy they’d attack normally. Two advancing would attack at advantage. Similarly if PCs group up together it costs more and more numbers of NPCs to attack them at advantage.
I don’t do a lot of non combat rules. It becomes a lot less rules and more rulings when it’s out of combat stuff. I do have some silly downtime things but most of the time the direct effect on combat is the same if the OOC things are successful or not. It’s like a different progression track completely.
The advantage thing is attractive because it is a one size fits all solution and it doesn’t have a GM reaching for charts of bonuses and penalties for super specific combat conditions but if you have a way of allowing it to expand for the way you’re handling group combat I think you found a workaround. And its feels mechanically cohesive with your dice banking concept.
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While I think Whitehack explicitly introduced Advantage/Disadvantage before 5e, it’s a concept that’s been around for a long time – Blood Bowl’s 3e Blitzing/Blocking rules are essentially Advantage/Disadvantage in the mid-90s, and Over the Edge had a very similar mechanic in '92, and part of that team wound up working on D&D after WotC bought TSR.
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tweet (the lead on over the edge) didn’t merely work on D&D, he was lead designer on 3rd edition (and god, 3rd edition seemed like a great idea at the time. What if D&D had a bunch of runequest retrofitted in? what a great idea. Too bad it spawned an unholy dread beast we still cannot slay after a quarter century)
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White hack predates 5e? I was not tuned into the retro stuff besides osric til recently. That’s wild. I’m was and still team pathfinder/3rd edition for years with the caveat that if anyone uses the term “build” in regard to their character they get shot. I just have a full shelf of monster books that I never want to turn away from.
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For general fantasy monsters, specifically with an OSR bent, I can’t recommend The Monster Overhaul by Skerples enough:
No stats (you can wing those pretty easily), just pertinent information for motivations (both for the monster and the party) and random tables that you might need.
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yeah it even predates the open playtests of 5e, the lack of acknowledgment of whitehack in 5e’s credits really annoyed me as mearls was actively courting the worst part of the osr scene while stealing the rules of the best part
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Yes! Skerples rules
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I’ve been wondering about that book. I heard it was random table heavy which is hit or miss depending on the tone but these seem fun.
The cool thing about being 100 years old is I still have the old basic creature catalog.
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The book is good. The book has a ton of tables, yeah, but the tables are good and organized. There’s other content, but with the amount of rule sets out there — it makes sense that a book of good tables will do well.
This is the current text for the more obscure downtime activities. The other ones are repairing, making food (bonuses for next day) and preserving food. You can also bring drinks to carouse and get bonus XP the same way you’d get bonus XP for successfully making and sharing art (I don’t think that’s in the screen shot)
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Part of me is wondering if I should make a mod for an existing game
Is this clear?
Rolls determine whether or not an uncertain action occurs and let you Pocket an edge for succeeding at future actions.
ROLL three dice. Based on your standing, use two dice and set aside one
- Standard: use the lowest die and either of the other two
- Advantage: use any two
- Disadvantage: use the lowest two dice
REPLACE, optionally, either of the two dice you kept with the value from your Pocket. The third unused die may now be put in your Pocket.
RESOLVE success or failure. If the sum is greater than or equal to the DR, you succeed. If not, you fail.
RE-ROLL, optionally, an unfavorable result. Reroll costs start at 1 point from a relevant Stat and each subsequent reroll costs an additional point.
my suggestion
You may now Pocket the value of the die you set aside.
I assume that you structured the REPLACE rule so that a player cannot pocket a die and then replace a value with the die they just pocketed. Can a player pocket a die if they opt not to replace? It is slightly unclear as it stands.
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June ended up being a lot of games run at a local bar event. Moonveil change in a lot of ways and tended to expand horizontally in a way that I don’t think is sustainable. Lots of skills and spells and cruft. I do think the rolling mechanic has been simplified to its best point.
Rolling:
Roll 2 dice normally. You can switch in your pocket for either placing the unused die in your pocket. Roll 3 take best or worst pair on advantage or disadvantage respectively.
Weapons:
I realized I couldn’t make a 1:1 equivalent to the entire roster of DnD’s weapons so I made weapon categories matching up with d4, 6, 8, and 10. Improvised, basic, standard, and large weapons all have the same starting damage. Properties differentiate them - some differentiate by min/mid/max damage and some enable what were martial skills. So all basic weapons do 1/2/4 damage, but a sharp one does 2/2/4 and a piercing one does 1/3/4.
Oh also weapons missing at the rate that DnD misses kinda sucks. 5+ does min, hitting Def+ is mid, and 10+ does max.
Skills:
I thought this was pretty clever attaching skills to weapons. Properties on weapons can have requirements so that a “found skill” can be claimed by any character in the party with the requirement instead of acquired by level and stuck on that one character. It’s up to the Field Guide to distribute weapons with cool skills. My current suggestion is that rolls of 12 should let a character “discover” a property on a weapon.
Magic Spells and Miracles are still a problem. I think they’re Ok but I don’t know how much I want them to be combat solutions or clever things. Even though I want both but tbh I think this is still a huge consideration that I just haven’t had enough time or gameplay to really figure it out.
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Oh final thing: enemies kinda had a hard time hitting characters with good defense. I made it so that enemy groups have a shared pocket and a generic “power” stat for all their rerolls. This also helps project the enemy threat level to the players without hefting a ton of clerical work on the field guide
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tongiht’s big thought is:
dungeons and dragons, minus martial classes, and also minus all spells that directly inflict damage
i’m not particularly attached to the medieval fantasy setting either tbh
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Are there any good rulesets or writeups that give advice on making rulings on the fly?