tabletop rpg thread, second edition

I am seriously, like

About to start writing them down

It’s a problem

post them in here, I’ll judge whether theyre good solutions or pure grognardisms

YOU ASKED FOR IT

For reference I am working from this thing

ARMOR
Medium and heavy armors must be fitted to their wearers. Wearing an unfitted medium armor gives -2 AC, and an unfitted heavy -3 AC. For both, unfitted armor eliminates any Dex bonus to AC and gives a -2 penalty to Dex checks.

Armor may be fitted by an appropriate professional for half the purchase cost.

Magical armors automatically fit their wearers.

All medium and heavy armors give disadvantage for stealth. Lights do not.

LIGHT
Heavy Clothes 8+Dex
Gambeson 11+Dex
Mail Shirt 12+Dex

MEDIUM
Full Mail 13+Dex (max 2)
Breastplate 14+Dex (max 2)

HEAVY
Heavy armors reduce speed by 10’ unless the wearer has the Con shown.
Heavy armors permit 1 Dex bonus to AC if the wearer has the Strength shown, and give a -1 penalty to Dex checks unless the wearer has the Strength shown.

Brigandine 16 (Con=12, Str=12)
Plate Harness (Con=13, Str=14)
16 vs. bludgeon
18 vs. piercing
22 vs. slashing

MISC
Helm +2 AC
A helm gives its wearer a -2 penatly to any Perception checks.

Buckler +1 AC

Medium Shield +2 AC
A creature suffers a -1 penalty to Dex checks while wielding a medium shield. This penalty does not apply to AC.

Large Shield +3 AC
A creature may not add its Dex bonus to AC while wielding a large shield. Additionally, it suffers a -2 penalty to any Dex checks.

WEAPONS
LIGHT
In order to attack with two-weapons, only the offhand weapon need be Light, not both.

NIBMLE
A new modifier. The following weapons are “nimble” and grant a +2 attack bonus whenever used by a proficient creature:
Dagger
Spear
Quarterstaff
Longsword (halfswording only)
Rapier
Shortsword

REACH
In order to attack a creature wielding a weapon with Reach, a creature must spend a move or action closing distance. Closing distance provokes an attack of opportunity, with advantage, from the Reach-weapon wielder.

Once the distance has been closed, both combatants may attack normally.

In order to reopen distance and exploit his Reach, the Reach-weapon wielder must spend a move or action, provoking an attack of opportunity (this does not confer dis/avantage on either combatant).

If the combatants are separated by some other circumstance, the non-Reach combatant must once again close distance to attack the Reach combatant.

MISC CHANGES
DAGGER
Normal-sized weapons have Reach on a dagger wielder. If the dagger is wielded in the offhand with any non-dagger weapon in the main hand, the dagger may be used as part of a two-weapon attack normally with no penalty.

SPEAR
Has Reach if used two-handed.

QUARTERSTAFF
1d4 bludgeoning, versatile 1d6. Has Reach if used two-handed.

PIKE
A pike has Reach even on other weapons with Reach. If, however, an attacker closes distance TWICE, the pike now attacks at a disadvantage until distance is reopened.

GLAIVE
Does slashing or piercing damage, user’s choice.

HALBERD
Does slashing or bludgeoning damage, user’s choice.

GREATAXE
Does slashing and bludgeoning damage, whichever is most advantageous.

LONGSWORD
May be half-sworded. Half-swording requires 2 hands. Half-swording imposes Dagger Reach rules on the half-sworder. Half-swording is Nimble. Half-swording does 1d8 piercing damage.

POLLAXE
New weapon. Heavy, two-handed. Does 1d10 bludgeoning, slashing, or piercing, user’s choice.

2 Likes

oh yeah forgot

HEAVY CROSSBOW
Requires 2 actions to load. The user may use its move+action to load in a single round.

this is grog, check your math. an effective -4 for wearing medium and heavy armor is too punishing in a game (of heroic fantasy!) that maxes out at ~+10 bonus for high level characters.

5th edition probabilities

less punishing: make a stealth check without your dexterity bonus if you are wearing medium or heavy armor

this kind of bookkeeping was forcibly removed from 5e, don’t add it back in. This goes for every other instance of it.

same criticism applies as above but I wouldn’t just cut this one. Rather than adjustment. One idea would be to grant advantage on attack rolls vs opponents not using nimble weapons. Another would be add proficiency bonus to damage vs enemies wearing medium or heavy armor (These weapons are typically lower damage already so).

Consider it a design challenge. 5th edition’s math can only work because it is bounded, so don’t hand out + or - to rolls. Find a way to design what you want within those restrictions.

2 Likes

I’m gonna keep writing my breakdown of what we did on my table, but a brief interlude:

I’ve been using this and pouring through the book again the last few days. There’s some really interesting stuff in here! I like some of the rule changes away from D20 over to the system they use for trick dice was really newbie friendly. I especially like that (coming from fourth edition) they layed out character creation linearly. It was super easy for me to hand new players the book and they’d very easily work out rolling up a guy for their first time ever playing, wheres in D&D I was standing over shoulders and helping people out.

also once again I have ended up DMing a table of basically all women and it’ such a refreshing change of energy from my regular tables

Oh, this is already in the game, I just changed what armors it applies to. (There’s a stealth disadvantage for… padded armor? wtf?)

From a realism standpoint, the former makes sense, the latter not so much. However, I worry that granting advantage is TOO much of an advantage (if dis/advantage give an effective +/- 4, as you imply above). Still, what the hell, I’ll throw it in there.

Edits in bold:

ARMOR
Medium and heavy armors must be fitted to their wearers. Wearing an unfitted medium armor gives -2 AC, and an unfitted heavy -3 AC. For both, unfitted armor eliminates any Dex bonus to AC. [and gives a -2 penalty to Dex checks.] deleted

Armor may be fitted by an appropriate professional for half the purchase cost.

Magical armors automatically fit their wearers.

All medium and heavy armors give disadvantage for stealth. Lights do not.

LIGHT
Heavy Clothes 8+Dex
Gambeson 11+Dex
Mail Shirt 12+Dex

MEDIUM
Full Mail 13+Dex (max 2)
Breastplate 14+Dex (max 2)

HEAVY
Heavy armors reduce speed by 10’ unless the wearer has the Con shown.
Heavy armors permit 1 Dex bonus to AC if the wearer has the Strength shown. [and give a -1 penalty to Dex checks unless the wearer has the Strength shown.] deleted

Brigandine 16 (Con=12, Str=12)
Plate Harness (Con=13, Str=14)
16 vs. bludgeon
18 vs. piercing
22 vs. slashing

MISC
Helm +2 AC
A helm gives its wearer a disadvantage to any Perception checks.

SHIELDS
Shields only grant their AC bonus if the wielder is aware of the attacker.

Buckler +1 AC
A buckler may be drawn to the ready as a free action.

Medium Shield +2 AC
It takes one action to ready a medium shield.

Large Shield +3 AC
It takes one action to ready a large shield. A creature may not add its Dex bonus to AC while wielding a large shield.

WEAPONS
LIGHT
In order to attack with two weapons, only the offhand weapon need be Light, not both.

NIMBLE
A new modifier. The following weapons are “Nimble” and grant advantage on attack rolls whenever used by a proficient creature versus a creature not using a Nimble weapon:
Dagger
Spear
Quarterstaff
Longsword (halfswording only)
Rapier
Shortsword

REACH
In order to attack a creature wielding a weapon with Reach, a creature must spend a move or action closing distance. Closing distance provokes an attack of opportunity, with advantage, from the Reach-weapon wielder.

Once the distance has been closed, both combatants may attack normally.

In order to reopen distance and exploit his Reach, the Reach-weapon wielder must spend a move or action, provoking an attack of opportunity (this does not confer dis/advantage on either combatant).

If the combatants are separated by some other circumstance, the non-Reach combatant must once again close distance to attack the Reach combatant.

MISC CHANGES
UNARMED
Normal-sized weapons have Reach on an unarmed attacker, except a Monk. This applies as well to attempts to grapple, shove, or otherwise touch an armed opponent with bare hands.

DAGGER
Normal-sized weapons have Reach on a dagger wielder, except a Monk. If the dagger is wielded in the offhand with any non-dagger weapon in the main hand, the dagger may be used as part of a two-weapon attack normally with no penalty.

SPEAR
Has Reach if used two-handed.

QUARTERSTAFF
1d4 bludgeoning, versatile 1d6. Has Reach if used two-handed.

PIKE
A pike has Reach even on other weapons with Reach. If, however, an attacker closes distance TWICE, the pike now attacks at a disadvantage until distance is reopened.

GLAIVE
Does slashing or piercing damage, user’s choice.

HALBERD
Does slashing or bludgeoning damage, user’s choice.

GREATAXE
Does slashing and bludgeoning damage, whichever is most advantageous.

LONGSWORD
May be half-sworded. Half-swording requires 2 hands. Half-swording imposes Dagger Reach rules on the half-sworder. Half-swording is Nimble. Half-swording does 1d8 piercing damage.

POLLAXE
New weapon. Heavy, two-handed. Does 1d10 bludgeoning, slashing, or piercing, user’s choice.

HEAVY CROSSBOW
Requires 2 actions to load. The user may use its move+action to load in a single round.

So when I wrote the new Reach rules I didn’t take into account Disengage:

[quote]
If you take the Disengage action, your Movement doesn’t provoke opportunity attacks for the rest of the turn.[/quote]

Time for some theorycrafting. My intent was that once someone braves and comes within your Reach, it should be difficult for you to get him back out again. My “open distance” rule as stated sort of ignores the existence of Disengage:

Couple possibilities for new rules, each incentivizing different behaviors.

“Once an attacker has closed distance, the Reach-weapon wielder may use his move to retreat to Reach distance, but doing so provokes an attack of opportunity with advantage from his opponent. Using the Disengage action still provokes the opportunity attack, but no advantage is conferred.”

Theory fight:
Attacker Turn
Attacker > move to close distance
Defender > advantage AOO
Attacker > standard attack

Defender Turn
In order to reclaim reach, either

Defender > move to open distance
Attacker > advantage AOO
Defender > standard attack

A totally even trade. OR

Defender > move to open distance, disengage action
Attacker > standard AOO

Meaning the defender has given the attacker an extra standard attack in exchange for keeping his reach bonus. For the defender, this highly disincentivizes “kiting” and incentivizes simply staying in normal range once the attacker has closed. For the attacker, this highly incentivizes rushing the defender and closing as soon as possible, so he can’t poke you to death from out of your range while you deal with other targets.

Other potential rule:

“Once an attacker has closed distance, the Reach-weapon wielder may use his move to reopen distance back to Reach range, which provokes an attack of opportunity without advantage. He may use the Disengage action to avoid the attack of opportunity as normal.”

Theory fight:
Same attacker turn
Attacker > move to close distance
Defender > advantage AOO
Attacker > standard attack

Defender Turn

Defender > move to open distance
Attacker > standard AOO
Defender > standard attack

OR

Defender > move to open distance, disengage action
Attacker > (none)

This means the attacker is always at a deficit of one advantage attack to one standard attack. For the defender, this incentivizes “kiting”, or constantly retreating to reopen distance to keep the attacker at bay. This makes perfect sense from a realism standpoint. Kiting also has its own potential downsides: retreating may be impossible or dangerous depending on topography, and the defender is “bound” to this attacker and cannot choose his target. Therefore it incentivizes different behaviors for attackers depending on their tactical objectives: they may ignore the defender and suffer his unanswerable Reach attacks because they know he is a pain to chase down, but they may also prioritize the defender if they can push him into a corner, or isolate him away from his party or other important location or objective.

Since this is both tactically richer and more realistic, I think I like the second rule better. Thoughts?

I want to say, because my last two posts were just nitpicking, I do think putting in real reach mechanics is a good thing for dnd (and that this seems like a not-too-heavy way of doing it).

I’ll check out how reach was handled in BECMI for comparison purposes (will post those rules in here)

PS unlike the so called advanced editions, basic dnd had rules that differentiated between weapons beyond damage dice years before weapon proficiencies were a thing.

wtf is a BECMI

Tulpa, you know I can only interpret your nitpicking as acts of true love.

As for basic D&D, I’d love to know more. I guess those Basic Fantasy rules we used for that old game are pretty much the same thing? Or no?

BECMI is the acronym for Basic Expert Companion Master Immortal, the boxsets released that are sometimes summed up as “basic dnd”

Basic Fantasy is indeed based the Basic and Expert sets but it leaves out a lot of the more interesting stuff introduced in the later sets.

Ok, just looked it up and they didn’t actually have detailed Reach rules! They had specific weapon maneuvers you could do if trained in a particular weapon (for instance halberds can be used to hook opponents or disarm them, pikes could be used to deflect attacks, etc)

That’s a pretty cool idea from a game design standpoint, for differentiating characters, but kind of a silly idea from a realism standpoint - any hooky type thing can hook (axe, hammer, related polearm etc), and so on. Unless that’s already how it works.

I don’t know that the written 5e rules contain a generic “I wanna do some random cool shit” rules. I guess that’s what DMs are for. I don’t think “I wanna use my axe to hook his shield” really requires separate rules, the DM can just invent a contested check and then invent a result on success or failure.

I’ve been listening to more Adventure Zone in the car and fuuuuuuuck I wanna play D n Deeeeeeeeeee

That is indeed how it works.

This is a problematic line of thinking and you can even hear this happen sometimes on the adventure zone, where travis playing a fighter kind of chafes under the restrictions of not having a lot of explicitly cool things to do so he kind of has to play mother may I with the gm to do anything cool, whereas the magic users can just point to the list of cool things they can do and come up with inventive new ways to use those cool things.

Like, not every game should have detailed melee maneuvers or whatever, but dnd can really benefit from their presence because of the caster vs melee dichotomy where half the players don’t have anything cool they can explicitly do and the other half can summon meteors. So if you’re playing a fighter you’re at the mercy of your dm saying “I’ll allow it” and if you’re playing a wizard you can just do whatever is explicitly outlined in the rules.

I know TAZ isn’t the ideal representative of D&D but what I got out of it is “why in the world would you play a non-caster class, unless you really want to roleplay The Weak Guy?”

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As ever it was.

The first pitfall I see is that if you want to make physical classes as “cool” as casters, you end up giving them a whole bunch of explicit “powers” and then either you’re running a huge unwieldy beast of parallel but mutually exclusive combat systems (hello Shadowrun) or you just make them all run off the same system which completely smooths out any differences between classes (hello WoW, I mean 4e).

If instead you make a system where you replace “mother may I” with the much more freeing and satisfying “if it’s cool, you can do it” you are now running Feng Shui.

So like, what’s the solution where D&D still feels like D&D?

All I ever wanted to do was make the weapons and armor not stupid ;_;

I mean I think your changes are at the least interesting.

I do still have to read Shadow of the Demon Lord because that’s explicitly supposed to improve the lot of fighters by a lot without making things bland.

Making things more Feng Shui would probably improve melee and ranged combat a lot.

Like, a large part of it is “how do we make D&D still feel like D&D” is perhaps the wrong question because dnd combat is actually pretty bad so the only real options to improve it are to make it not like dnd.

Like bringing up 4e is perhaps the wrong move because while yes it does remove most differentiation between classes, the idea of making a consistent but verbose system isn’t wrong. Even codifying a rule or set of rules for “If you want to try something not explicitly described, this is what happens” is better than just leaving it up to a GM.

Runequest has good combat with strong differentiation between weapons and useful things for both fighters and casters to do but its too lethal for DnD. late 3.x D&D had the Book of Nine Swords which was kind of a prototype for 4e’s fighters, but it actually featured some alternative systems that felt much better in play than the cantrip/encounter/daily mmo split that 4e went with. I think a similar book got put out for pathfinder not too long ago.

The Usagi Yojimbo roleplaying game had fucking amazing melee combat for an RPG, and it kept things interesting while always being grounded in realistic action (no mmo powers, but an elaborate attack-parry-dodge system made more complex by measuring a person’s preparedness for fighting (if you lose the tempo completely you’ll be reeling and much easier to hit. On the opposite end, you’ll be focused and can do impressive stunts))

That system we ran where you played 4 dudes until most of them died had that cool system where you spent basically grit points I think? to describe rad stunts you do

I feel like that retained the spirit of D&D but made physical classes more interesting (and mechanically, pretty similar to casters)

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Is there some extent to which “Fighter is boring tank” just IS the D&D flavor at this point, and if you mess with it too much you’re playing some other game?

My new rules make me want to play an actually effective medieval man-at-arms, with either shield+spear w/ longsword sidearm and/or full plate pollaxe. I feel like that would be cool as hell, lack of abilities be damned.

Oh, uh, rule change: Spear and Quarterstaff (and Trident I guess which has the same stats as Spear and why do they bother putting it in separately) have Reach even when used one-handed. They would be the only weapons that have this feature, which offsets their lame damage.

the real solution is to not have classes tbh

it’s hard to avoid scaring people away with a twenty page (heavily edited down and revised but mandatory) perks list though (negging my own system here)

but… even then towards the end of my campaign the mages were definitely starting to outshine everyone else

@Khan’s solution of “everyone is a mage but you write your own spells with the GM and can push into pretty much any niche you want by doing that” is probably my favorite, on balance. want to be a fighter and do cool stuff? just get into some magical martial arts (or “MMA fighting” for short)

I mean D&D already has monks.

I want to wear armor and pollaxe some other motherfucker in armor.

My other favoritest thing in the world is rogues and I’ve always thought the efforts to make them worth something in combat post-2e (where they just sucked in combat and it was ok because they were useful elsewhere) has been the height of dumbness.