One-Shot Google Wave D&D Game

I've been wanting to start an online role-playing campaign for a few weeks now, but I've had a hard time deciding what medium through which to play. In the past, I've favored play-by-chat to play-by-post, but I'm wondering if play-by-post will do better with folks' busy schedules and different time zones. Also, with all the buzz about role-playing via Google Wave, I thought it might be fun to experiment with running a one-shot, play-by-post game on Wave to see how well it works. So, that's what I'm doing.


If you'd like to participate in the experiment, please email me at ego-at-anglicangeek-dot-com. I already have six interested players, so I'm hoping to gain a few more so I can run two different parties. Each party will vote to determine whether to use Basic/Expert D&D (via Labyrinth Lord), 1e AD&D (via AEC), or 3.5e D&D (via Pathfinder). The adventure will be an investigative, open-ended affair that I would expect to take 8 hours of table time (so, probably 2 or so weeks via play-by-post).


I have Google Wave invitations a-plenty if you aren't already in the Wave beta.

Labyrinth Lord House Rule: D6-Based Weapon Damage

D6-Based Weapon Damage

A House Rule for B/X D&D and Labyrinth Lord

All weapons fall into one of three weapon classes: small (S), medium (M), and large (L). Weapon damage is determined by weapon class, as follows:

Class | Damage

-------------

    S | D6-1 [1]

    M | D6

    L | D6+1 [2]

[1] the minimum damage for a small weapon is 1

[2] unless otherwise noted, large weapons require two hands to wield

The weapons from B/X D&D and Labyrinth Lord are classified as follows:

Weapon             | Class

--------------------------

axe, battle        | L

axe, hand          | M

club               | M

crossbow, heavy    | L

crossbow, light    | M

dagger             | S

dart               | S

flail              | M

flail, heavy       | L

hammer, light      | M

hammer, war        | L

javelin            | M

lance              | L

longbow            | L

mace               | M

morning star       | L

pick, heavy        | L

pick, light        | M

pole arm           | L

quarterstaff       | L

scimitar           | M

short bow [3]      | M

sling              | M

spear              | L

sword, long        | M

sword, bastard [4] | M or L

sword, short       | S

sword, two-handed  | L

trident            | L

[3] a short bow requires two hands to wield in spite of it's weapon class

[4] a bastard sword may be wielded either as a medium or large weapon; when wielded as a large weapon it requires two hands

Labyrinth Lord House Rule: Fewer Hit Points

Since YARPS isn't going to be ready for a true play-test for a few months, I'm going to be using Labyrinth Lord with a number of house rules for my soon-to-start online campaign. One of my gripes with B/X D&D and Labyrinth Lord (and, in fact, all editions of D&D) is that combat isn't deadly enough, particularly at higher levels. Several factors contribute to this problem, but the one that I dislike the most (and the easiest to address) is the high number of hit points characters have. So, here is my first experiment at a house rule to remedy the high number of hit points.

Fewer Hit Points
A House Rule for B/X D&D and Labyrinth Lord

All characters start with the maximum possible hit points at first level. Instead of rolling for additional hit points at each level, characters gain a fixed amount of hit points, according to their class' hit die, upon attaining even levels:

Hit Points per Even Level Attained by Hit Die
D4:  1
D6:  2
D8:  3
D10: 4

If a character has a CON bonus to hit points, it is only applied at first level and upon attaining even levels.

Halflings' Luck in YARPS

During my lunch break today, I did some work on the Halfling class design. I want to share a nugget, one of the 1st-level Halfling class abilities:

Lucky die

A halfling's player may add an additional "lucky" die of a different color to their dice pool. Once per adventure, after rolling and seeing the results, the player may replace a normal die from the pool with the the lucky die. Once the lucky die is so used, it may not be included in the dice pool until the next adventure.

Halflings will get an additional lucky die at levels 4 and 8, for a total of three. I'm not sure if this approach to luck is unique (I've seen similar systems, but not quite the same), but I sure do like it. And it hints at my earlier statement about having an "interesting dice pool system" around the 2D6 dice pool.

YARPS Success Tests

I haven't made nearly as much progress on YARPS as I would like (with being so close to shipping a major product release at work), but I have managed to spend a few nights crunching numbers and settling a few key design decisions. It's already clear that what will finally be YARPS will be quite different from my original thoughts, but that's okay; I really like the shape that it's taking. I've nearly finished designing the fighter class, and I'm happy to report that it's a fighter class I'd enjoy playing (which is saying something, as I don't generally like playing pure fighters). Hopefully I can post a preview later this week.

One of the decisions I made last week was to use 2D6 as the dice roll for competency and success tests. As you surely know (unless you've never role-played, in which case I have to ask, "Why are you here!?"), D&D and many other games use a D20 for the "core mechanic." I like 2D6 better because there are 36 possible outcomes instead of 20, with almost half as many possible end results (11). This, in turn, means two things: min and max rolls are less likely (nearly half as likely), and a +1 modifier applied to the end result is more significant (because there are nearly half the end results).

(There's also an interesting dice pool system that can be applied with 2D6, but that's the subject of a future 'blog post).

To illustrate the difference, imagine you're playing D&D and you need to roll a 20 to hit. Your character has a +1 modifier to hit. This means you have a 1 in 10 (10%) chance to hit. Adding another +1, for a total of +2, increases your odds to 3 in 20 (15% ). Each additional +1 will increase your chances by another 5%. That's helpful, but it means you need to start stacking bonuses before it's really meaningful, especially at high levels. Anyone who's played older editions of D&D for any length of time has experienced this.

Now let's pretend you're playing YARPS, and you need to hit an opponent with a DEF (defense) of 12 (the equivalent of D&D's 20). If you have a +1 to hit, your chances improve from 1 in 36 (3%) to 3 in 36 (8%). Add another +1, for +2 total, and your chances improve to 6 in 36 (17%). Each additional plus increases your chances along a normal curve. Whereas your chance only improves to 25% with +4 in D&D, your chance improves to 42% in YARPS.

And, because YARPS works against a normal curve, the effects of modifiers are even more striking for usual (that is, level-appropriate) rolls. Rolling a 10 in D&D with +1 gives you a 5% boost, from 50% to 55%. Rolling a 7 in YARPS (the nearest equivalent) with +1 gives you a 14% boost, from 58% to 72%.

What does all this mean, applied? It means that in YARPS, you'll really appreciate those +1 bonuses. It means that if you have the highest score for a given attribute, you will really stand out among your race. It means that a level 1 orc has only a prayer of defeating your level 10 PC, and your level 6 PC isn't going to fare well against that level 12 dragon. And It means that I don't have to inflate or stack bonuses (or have huge hit point pools) to achieve the sort of level disparity and character growth curve that I'm looking for.

One Page Dungeon Play-test

The One Page Dungeon Contest 2010 submission deadline is less than a month away, and I’d like to get a group together to play-test my entry, the evening of Thursday, February 18th. I'm hoping a few of my MVP friends will be able to join, as they'll be up this way for the MVP Summit. For the rest of you, email me at ego at anglicangeek if you want to join.

The dungeon is designed for “old school” D&D, Labyrinth Lord specifically. The rules are very simple, so even if you've never played Labyrinth Lord, or even D&D, you’ll be just fine. The adventure is targeting a party of five to six 5^th-level characters. It’s a “classic” dungeon crawl, with tactical encounters, traps, and maybe a puzzle or two set in a (hopefully) interesting atmosphere.

YARPS Attributes (and Using 4D6 Instead of 3D6)

I'll soon be starting my first YARPS play-test. I originally thought I'd forego standard attributes and defined classes, but after the first design iteration I decided to keep both [1] (my reasons and thoughts on the matters might be topics for future 'blog posts).

One of my top 5 design goals for YARPS was to not impede characterization (or personification, if you prefer). To that end, I eliminated the intelligence, wisdom, and charisma attributes. In my experience, players rarely play down to these attributes when they're low, and it's rather hard to play above your own human limitations when they're high. So it will be up to the players, rather than the system, to decide how smart, stupid, wise, foolish, charming, or obnoxious their characterization is.

That leaves the three physical attributes: strength, dexterity, and constitution (I prefer the term toughness, but I worry that changing the attribute name would introduce too much confusion for too little benefit). To that I added two new attributes: speed and comeliness (a measure of how pleasing a character's physical appearance is). These, then, are YARPS five standard attributes.

To generate a character's attributes, a player rolls 4D6 five times and assigns the score, the sum of each roll, to the attributes in order. Why did I choose 4D6 instead of 3D6? In a word: probability.

There are 216 possible results for a roll of three six-sided dice. This means that the probability of rolling the lowest and highest score (3 and 18 respectively) is 1 in 216, or 0.46%. Applied, it means that 1 in 216 characters will have the highest (or lowest) possible score for a given attribute [2]. That's just too often for my liking.

A roll of four six-sided dice has 1296 possible results. A character rolling the highest (or lowest) score for an attribute 1 in 1296 times (or 0.08%) is still too frequent for my liking, but it's much more tolerable. And summing the roll is still mentally manageable (I've noticed once you add 7 or 8 dice into a summed pool players start slowing down while tallying; this matters to me because I'll be using 4D6 as my "core" competency mechanic for YARPS as well, instead of 1D20).

I'm still going to have a 1-3 attribute modifier range (-3 to -1 for low attributes, +1 to +3 for high attributes), but having a character with a -/+2 or -/+3 modifier will be more exceptional. This is how it will break down:

Score    Modifier    Probability
-----    --------    --------------------
    4    -3            1 in 1296 ( 0.08%)
  5-7    -2           24 in 1296 ( 2.62%)
 8-11    -1          275 in 1296 (21.21%)
12-16    none        676 in 1296 (52.17%)
17-20    +1          275 in 1296 (21.21%)
21-23    +2           24 in 1296 ( 2.62%)
   24    +3            1 in 1296 ( 0.08%)

What I like about this table:

• Less than .2% of characters will have the the lowest or highest score for a given attribute (-3 or +3)
• Roughly 5% of characters will have an exceptionally low or high score (-2 or +2), often enough that a given party should have a few such scores

Comparing this to Moldvay Basic:

• -/+ 3 goes from 0.92% in Moldvay Basic to 0.16% in YARPS
• -/+ 2 goes from 8.3% to 5.24%
• -/+ 1 goes from 42.56% to 42.42%, nearly the same

With this I've accomplished what I wanted, which is the same probability for -/+ 1, but a lower probability for -/+ 2 and -/+ 3. With this, I can design the system such that +1 is a real boon (or penalty) for an action test or effect roll, without worrying too much about balancing +1 against +2 and +3. More on how I intend to do that in my next post on YARPS action tests.

The most-mentioned concern I've heard when posing the 4D6 idea to others is that a maximum (or minimum) roll will now be so rare that you could game for a year (or years) and never see it during character generation. I considered this, and based on my experience and anecdotes, I think it will still happen, just much less frequently (which is my desire). I guess play-testing and time will tell. It'll be an interesting experiment, regardless.

---

[1] The design "base" for YARPS is Moldvay/Cook B/X D&D, but I'm also leaning heavily on White Box D&D.

[2] Treating an attribute roll as a single event when trying to determine overall probability of exceptional attribute scores is of course incorrect; you must consider all five attribute roll events. But in the interest of simplicity, I'm foregoing proper math.