I tried out Kelsey Dionne's Shadowdark this morning with Alex as the game master and joined by Moth as another player! We were going through Alex's megadungeon that he had made for OD&D , one in which I had played before but died just a couple rooms in. Got farther this time! :P This is a session report as well as a review of Shadowdark . It's a mixed bag but more good than bad. It hangs onto conventions from classic D&D that I think it is (or should be) better than. Session Report Moth and I both rolled up halflings. Apparently Alex's dungeon has historically only ever seen little pla ..read more

Need to write something to stay in the habit. Story's going well, just trying to avoid burnout. There are three separate "problems" I have: making attack and damage rolls separate per se is tedious; attack bonuses are tedious to track separately and can also be confusing, e.g., about whether you also add them to damage rolls; and the set of classic armor class values {10, 12, 14, 16} represents very low probabilities if you assume a typical modifier of 0. How about you use your damage roll as your attack bonus? Meaning:   D20 + D(Weapon) ≥ AC We would get probabilities as follows (notice ..read more

A bit of a mouthful! I had the thought: why not give each instance of a weapon constant damage, but roll to determine that constant amount? For example, a D6 weapon can deal somewhere from 1 to 6 damage, and one you buy from town might just deal 3 damage. However, if you go adventuring, you might come across special ones that deal even more (or less). Besides reducing the complexity of combat, this also introduces Diablo -style loot where you get just a little meaningful granularity. Plus, check this: on a roll of 1, you increase the rarity of the item and reroll the weapon die. Each point of ..read more

While simulating an idea I had for speed-based initiative , I realized that the results had implications for bonuses on d20 rolls in general. When two characters roll off, how good is a relative +1? Column A is where the more capable character breaks ties, and column B is where ties are broken with more rolls. Bonus Results A Results B Relative +0 50% vs 50% 50% vs 50% 100% +1 57% vs 43% 55% vs 45% 125% +2 61% vs 39% 59% vs 41% 150% +3 66% vs 34% 64% vs 36% 200% Those are really intuitive odds, actually! A character whose ability bonus is 3 pips greater than another is doubly capable. This con ..read more

Wasn't happy with my last conversion because CR is not a pure measure of longevity like HD. It accounts for AC as well. Since then, though, I've come up with an actual measure for OD&D that counts both HD and AC! So we can do some mad science now. I mapped CR values to virtual HD values (virtual HP / 3.5), and found a really tight function for CR ≥ 1 and VHD ≥ 3. CR = 0.5 × VHD – 0.5 VHD = 2 × CR + 1 Let's put this funky function to the test. Below is a table converting monsters from 5e to OD&D and vice versa. Keep in mind that dragons of different ages do not truly have different HD v ..read more

Did forbidden 5e math too. The whole game is fake! Shout-out to Paul Hughes' business card monster manual , and Reddit user Asinus for their calculations on average DPR per character tier . Basically, I figured out that the game really is balanced around monsters taking around 4 hits or 7 attacks to defeat if their CR equals the party's level. In other words, a medium encounter should take about 2-3 rounds to resolve. This is because monsters' hit points and armor class increases at more or less the same rate as player-characters' damage-per-round and attack bonus, respectively. We can extrapo ..read more

Continuing discussion on worker placement and dis/advantage math . Here's a thought, in the context of good old D&D Fifth Edition : for standard tasks, low DCs (~10) make more sense for rolls made by individual characters whereas, high DCs (~15) make more sense for rolls made by a group of characters or by a single specialized character. This seems like the rationale behind the differing likelihoods of success in classic D&D using d20 or d6. The former die, used in combat, hovers around 50% for weaker monsters fought on-one-on and closer to 25% for stronger monsters that are fought by ..read more

Have been reading Levi Kornelson's series on modeling the play-style of D&D , which has been really fantastic and full of fun graphs! Each time ones comes out, though, my friends joke that each new graph is also a pride flag. With their help, I've finagled this beautiful work of art based on Levi's graphs and color scheme. While I have a soapbox: one criticism I have of the articles, though I really enjoy them and have mostly agreed, is that the rows of the graph-turned-flag correspond to the frequency of ability scores and their applications. I feel like it would be more representative if ..read more

When playing Trophy Gold with my friend Alex of To Distant Lands as the referee, I was delighted at how he subverted a classic D&D trope. Instead of "starting at a tavern", going through the motions of meeting each other and stumbling onto some quest or other prospect—Alex asked us each how our player-characters act when drunk as part of introducing them. Are they a raging drunk, or a sleepy one? Do they go all out or do even they drink at all? The icebreaker was like alcohol, distilling and exaggerating our characters' personalities to their very base. It was so fun! After introductions ..read more

Wanted to share two good posts on Illusory Sensorium : " There Is No Light " and " Doom Clock ". Totally agree with the critical dimensions of those blogs, especially about the futility of light-as-resource-management and the disappointment of the hazard die in its attempt to simplify the typical dungeon exploration procedure. Really good reading!! That being said, I phrased the above like that because I care less for his proposal of the doom clock. This is a personal preference thing, not me trying to dog on him. I feel like the basic dynamics of site structure and exploration procedure alrea ..read more