Skip to main content

Let's Ride!

Just had a fun evening with the kid, using +Benjamin Baugh's B/X supplement: At 5th Level, Everybody Rides.

The idea is that, just as you get a fancy house when you enter upper-level domain-style play, you get an epic mount when you reach the point where B/X introduces wilderness exploration. And who doesn't want an epic mount?



The kid had been asking if his lizardman fighter could catch a hippocampus. I pulled out Benjamin's rules, and the kid forgot entirely about any fish-tailed horses, and instead rolled:

GHOSTLY, the undead coal-fired cyborg horse-fox-spider chimera!

Ghostly is a walking nightmare, ridden by a lizardman with a flaming sword. My seven-year-old is metal as fuck.

And so, of course, we didn't stop there:

Lisa, the rabbit cleric, rides high atop a tiger-striped wooly mammoth that can sound the heavenly trumpets with his trunk.

Bochen, the griffon wizard, doesn't need a mount, because he's a griffon. But he gained a companion: a spectral crab that floats behind him, focusing Bochen's magic and nibbling at anything that catches his interest.

And Durgan, the rustic bear pankratiast, plods along on Wilmore, a grumbling rhinoceros beetle.

In just a few pages, Benjamin packed a lot of goods. There's enough die-roll randomization to spur your imagination, but enough choice that you end up with a mount that feels right for your character.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
14 comments
Read more

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...
1 comment
Read more