“For this my lamp is lit, to the grief of the owls, and often burns till lark-song.”
—Lord Dunsany, The Charwoman's Shadow
Rather than having a roll, leading to a complication, leading to a table attempting to summarise the possible things that could go wrong, I thought of using tarot card draws for downtime results.
In particular for actions like Cultivate Relationship and Build Institution, where it’s less a straight succeed/fail and novel obstacles and situations tend to arise.
“…whenever anyone came to inspect it before purchase, the caretaker used to praise the house in the words that Nuth had suggested. “If it wasn’t for the drains,” she would say, “it’s the finest house in London,” and when they pounced on this remark and asked questions about the drains, she would answer them that the drains also were good, but not so good as the house.”
—Lord Dunsany, How Nuth Would Have Practiced His Art Upon the Noles
The upper part of the range of the d20 roll used to resolve #downtimes in the previous article determines whether the downtime was particularly successful or unsuccessful.
The lower part, indicating an average result, provides space for other complications, and consists of a seperate 1-8 table written for each available lodging, such as the default lodging of the campaign:
An unpretentious room at a local inn, with a small fire in the grate. Recovery Rate: 1d6 CON/DT Ameneties: None. [Some kind of bonus to hiring retainers might be appropriate if we envision the inn as a clearing house for would-be adventurers.]
1-5: Pay Your Tab – 100cn upkeep (+50 per retainer) 6: Petty Theft – the cheapest gem, jewellery or other small treasure is taken. 7: Disturbed Sleep – Rowdy patrons reduce base recovery rate to 0 this DT. 8: Nemesis – If an enemy is looking to harm the PC, they gain access to the Inn.
#RedHack uses discrete descriptive experiences rather than points. To level up you must checkmark a number of Experiences equal to 2 plus the level you’re advancing to.
All four basic classes cap out at 12, at which point you can either just play the domain game or introduce Advanced classes for the next 12 levels, similar to the Paragon Paths of 4e or 3e Prestige classes.
Once HP are depleted in #RedHack further damage spills over into CON. Upon taking CON damage a character must make a CON test to keep fighting.
Once incapacitated, a character’s fate is determined by the downed table:
* this save is made on your CON value before the damage was dealt.
Fighters in the Black Hack have a pool of d6 equal to their level they can add to attacks each round or use to make additional attacks; making the class almost a walking fireball.
Thieves can sneak attack to auto-hit for 2d6+Level damage. Which is nice, but not as impressive a xd6 damage with no set-up.
Following the principle that classes don’t need to be balanced but that everyone should have something fun and useful to do in combat, I wanted to emphasise the Fighter as the martial AoE class and the Thief as the single-target DPS.
Last month we tried out some new wilderness travel rules in #RedHack. The party were travelling from Castle Mystamere to the Iron fort, through hexes 502, 402, 302 and 202.
With regard to #RedHack’s under/over rolls, if we’re setting aside the range 2-7 for particularly difficult skills (such as Thief skills) this implies a division of the non-critical range into three sections of six, and these could be used to correspond to five different levels of success:
1: Unlucky! It happens to the best of us. 2-7: Basic: Almost anyone could do this. The inept occasionally, the skilled routinely. 8-13: Expert: As hard as scaling a sheer wall. A competent person can do it, if they’re lucky. 14-19: Master: Only someone of exceptional ability could achieve a result like this, and not often. 20: Lucky! The fool sometimes prospers.
One area this could be useful is when we need a range of outputs, such as when identifying items, understanding languages or recalling lore. For instance, a basic success on item identification is only possible for a thief, whose discount and bring the difficulty below 7; while a master result is only possible for a character with high INT.
I keep coming back to the question of encumbrance in #RedHack. It's a hard thing to streamline, because the input consists of numerous very different items, from loose coins to plate armour, and the output is some point at which the PC slows down to some degree, and another point at which the PC cannot move, ideally mediated by some combination of STR and CON. (I like CON as a measure of how much you can carry, as opposed to how much you can lift.)
But items move around a lot, so it all has to be recalculated anytime something is dropped, picked up or traded.
D&D attributes are a curious beast insofar as they come in two parts; a smaller number that actually gets used most of the time, and the 3-18 rating from which it is derived. This would make sense if attributes routinely went up in value, making the large number a kind of XP value for the smaller one, but – at least in earlier editions – they don’t.
Humans are social animals. Our big brains are optimised for navigating social environments, for worrying what people think of us, for dealing with questions of cooperation, negotiation, duty and shame. We’re prone to mass hysteria and tabu. Our thought processes are skewed by the moods of those around us.
Attanasio writes that the first act of human imagination was the immortality of the soul. I’m not sure this is true. I would guess instead that the first act of imagination – and the origin of what we call magic, both in fiction and in the practice of various real-life wizards and occultists – was animism, the perception of the material and natural world as a social environment.
All magic arises from this personalisation of the world. Any transformative process without this personal, social element is necessarily science, and not magic – simply an observable, repeatable feature of the world.