Skip to main content

Scaffolds & Dragons: Races

I've been playing a lot with the kid, mostly by-the-book Holmes. I bough the kid his own copy of the Blueholme Prentice Rules, which makes for a great introduction. It's clearly written, a nicely digestible amount for a kid to wrap his head around, and the public domain fairy-tale art looks great and passes the parental appropriateness check.

This is my first time as an adult even attempting to play rules-as-written, and it's been a great experience. If Blueholme Compleat were out, we'd definitely carry on with that. But, now that our characters are starting to get up in levels, we need to transition to another ruleset.

The kid wants to trade off GM'ing sessions with me for some friends, this summer. To make things easier on both him and his friends, I'm back to hacking a simplified ruleset.

I've abandoned some of the scaffolding I built into my earlier attempts at a set of Kid's Rules. The kid wants real damage, the possibility of death, and was entirely disdainful of my Luck mechanic.

Instead, I'm doubling down on old school mortality by running funnels. I'm trying to make it clear that the players should expect to lose characters in the first adventure, and that the goal is to have one character make it to first level. My kid likes it, but he's had some time to get into the D&D mindframe. We'll see how the others fare.

Anyway, here are the Races we've been using, so far. We started out using +Richard LeBlanc's Animal Classes, but I'm ditching race-as-class, despite my great fondness for it. But then, I'm also ditching Class in favor of more ala carte Training Levels.

Bet you can't guess which race was invented by a seven-year-old.

Races
Cat
High Stat: Dexterity
Low Stat: Strength
Nightvision: Cats can see in the dark.
Balance: Cats get +2 to climb, balance, and only take half damage (rounding down) from falling.
Small: Cats are too small to use Large weapons.

Dwarf
High Stat: Constitution
Architecture: Dwarves get +2 to spot details related to underground environments, including traps and secret doors.
Craft: Dwarves get +2 to make and repair objects.
Greed: Dwarves must succeed at a Wisdom check in order to ever resist going after treasure, even if they know it’s unwise.

Elf
High Stat: Dexterity
Low Stat: Constitution
Keensight: Elves get +2 to spot hidden details, or to notice things from a distance.
Wildland Guardians: Elves get +2 to sneak, hide, or survive in the wilderness.
Fey: The touch of iron hurts elves, making them unable concentrate. Elves are at -4 to all rolls if touching iron or steel.

Faun
High Stat: Charisma
Low Stat: Wisdom
Music: Fauns cast spells by playing music, which they can do while walking or dancing. When they first learn Spells, they will begin with either Sleep or Charm, plus one random spell.

Lizardfolk
High Stat: Strength
Low Stat: Charisma
Aquatic: Lizard-people swim well, and can hold their breath for a number of minutes equal to their Constitution.
Scaly Skin: +2 to Armor Class unless they are wearing Medium or Heavy Armor.

Monkey
High Stat: Dexterity
Low Stat: Wisdom
Climb: Monkeys get +4 to climb, and can perform other activities, including carrying things or fighting, while climbing.
Small: Monkeys are too small to use Large weapons.

Rabbit
Fleet Feet: Rabbits move quickly, and get +2 to AC when running away.
Long Ears: Rabbits are +2 to any roll based on hearing.
Small: Rabbits are too small to use Large Weapons.

Giant Banana with Legs
Slippery Peel: Three times a day, shed skin to slip up opponents. As long as the Banana does not move from the shed peel, any approaching opponents must make a Dexterity check or slip and fall. They must spend a round getting up or attack at -2.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Knaves, fancypants

I've prepared a new layout document of Ben Milton's Knaves . Knaves is a great, light rules set that has an extremely elegant core mechanic while retaining total compatibility with OSR material. It's pretty much the rpg of my dreams. This document contains the complete rules, plus a bunch of useful hacks from the community, plus a few of my invention, plus some useful resources from Ben Milton's previous effort, Maze Rats . EDIT: I've updated the layout to fix errata and make a few tweaks. Further, I've made 3 variations: KNAVES TABLET LAYOUT The Tablet Layout is meant for scrolling on screens, and contains hyperlinks. KNAVES SPREAD LAYOUT The Spread Layout is set up to print on Letter-sized paper. KNAVES A4 LAYOUT The A4 Layout is set up to print on A4 paper, and is probably the most elegant of the three versions. This is presented with generous permission from Ben Milton, and should in no way be an excuse for not purchasing a copy of Knav

Maze Rats by Post

In my previous post , I reviewed a bunch of my favorite rulesets for optimization for Play-by-Post. It occurred to me almost immediately that I hadn't really thought about Maze Rats enough. In fact, I'd mis-remembered and mischaracterized it. Upon reflection, one of the mechanics I took issue with is actually a big strength. Re-reading the rules, it seems like just a few very simple hacks could make it a highly-optimized PbP game. As follows: Danger Rolls are rolled by the GM. Danger rolls usually fail, so it is in the player’s interest to describe their actions plausibly and mitigate as many risks as they can, in the hopes that they don’t trigger a danger roll. 2d6 + ability bonus ≥ 10 If you have taken enough precautions to have a distinct advantage in an action, but not enough to have eliminated the distinct possibility of danger, the GM will give you a roll with advantage. 3d6 keep 2 + ability bonus ≥ 10 Because each character only has 3 ability scores (S

Reviewing Rules for Play-by-Post Optimization

I’ve played a lot of PbP games: all your favorite flavors of OD&D, AD&D, and their retroclones, Call of Cthulhu, Marvel Superheroes, Traveller, Dungeon World, etc. ad nauseam. In almost every instance, I forgot what ruleset we were using at some point. Which is a good thing. Once chargen is over, you spend a lot more time describing your characters actions and poring over the GM’s descriptions than you spend interacting with rules. When you do roll, it’s usually a combat to-hit roll, which you’ve probably programmed into the online dice-roller as a macro. Pretty much any game will work for PbP. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t points of possible optimization. Point 1: Resolution. Anything that can keep the action moving is a boon to PbP. A game that requires a back-and-forth exchange of information to resolve an action is going to progress very slowly. A good rule of thumb is that it’ll take 2 or 3 days to get a response from any given player. At that pace, an exch