Spes Magna Games

A post for today featuring yet another new AD&D monster? Can do easy!

Zeni
Frequency: Uncommon
No. Appearing: 4-24
Armor Class: 8, 6, or 4 (see below)
Move: up to 12″
Hit Dice: 1+1 to 3+3
% in Lair: Nil
Treasure Type: Nil
No. of Attacks: 1
Damage/Attack: See below
Special Attacks: See below
Special Defenses: See below
Magic Resistance: Standard
Intelligence: Animal
Alignment: Neutral
Size: S to L (3′ diameter per HD)
Psionic Ability: Nil
Attack/Defense Modes: Nil
Level/XP Value: 1+1 HD (III/56 + 2/hp), 2+2 HD (III/95 + 3/hp), 3+3 HD (IV/160 + 4/hp)

Zenis resemble ordinary barrel cacti, at least until they attack or move. These carnivorous plants move via rolling, and it takes time for them to build up speed. On the first round, zenis roll at 3″, and this speed increases by 3″ per round until a maximum speed of 12″ is reached.

As zenis increase in size, their exteriors become thicker and more resistant to injury. The smallest zenis are AC 8. Medium-size zenis are AC 6, and the largest zenis are AC 4.

Zenis attack one of two ways: rolling into their prey or by releasing a cloud of spines. A creature struck by a rolling zeni takes damage based on the zeni’s size and speed. A 1+1 hit die zeni inflicts 1-4 points of damage. This damage increases to 2-8 points for a 2+2 hit dice zeni and to 3-12 points for a 3+3 hit dice zeni. The monster inflicts additional damage equal to its movement rate divided by 3. So, a 3+3 hit dice zeni moving at 9″ inflicts 6-15 points of damage when it rolls into a creature. If the creature struck by a rolling zeni is not larger than the zeni, the creature may be knocked down unless it succeeds on a saving throw versus breath weapon. The saving throw is made with a +4 modifier if the creature is same size as the zeni.

Usually after it rolls into its prey, a zeni releases a cloud of spines. Each spine has wing-like structures that enable it to buzz about much like an insect. The spines fill a sphere in a 10-foot radius around the zeni. Creatures within the cloud sustain 1 hit point of damage for each melee round they remain in it, regardless of armour class. The referee will cause all creatures with one or fewer hit dice to check morale. Fire will force the spines back to their zeni, and a fireball clears the spines from its blast area. The spines lasts for up to 2 melee rounds for each of the zeni’s hit dice, and then they return to their zeni.

Zenis take half damage from lightning attacks. They are immune to fear, poison, and paralysis.

Tags: AD&D, monsters

The inclusion of various downtime activities is one of the more interesting parts of 5E D&D. Downtime activities are things that PCs may do between adventures. The 5E PH describes Crafting, Practicing a Profession, Recuperating, Researching, and Training. The 5E DMG expands the list with Building a Stronghold, Carousing, Crafting a Magic Item, Gaining Renown, Performing Sacred Rites, Running a Business, Selling Magic Items, Sowing Rumors, and a variant rule for Training to Gain a Level. I’ve been playing 5E D&D about twice a month for probably a couple of years. Downtime activities have rarely appeared in our games, and not for a lack of trying.

Insert awkward segue here.

I’ve continued my leisurely read-through of James M. Spahn’s second edition of The Hero’s Journey (THJ hereafter), The Hero’s Grimoire, and The Hero’s Companion. (Nota Bene: The previous links are affiliate links.) I remain impressed by Mr. Spahn’s work, and I think that THJ has a lot to offer, and not just to OSR-inspired games.

In THJ, Making Camp gets two pages, talking about the effects of inadequate food and water, the need for sleep and rest, and the effects of keeping a watch. The short version is that characters need to eat, drink, and sleep, and if they don’t, bad effects start to accrue. Not setting a watch pretty much guarantees getting caught off guard by curious monsters. While encamped, characters may recover Endurance (hit points in THJ) and may regain daily uses of abilities. All of this sounds quite familiar. It’s been part of RPGs for decades.

What stands out is the section about Relaxing Around the Campire, or RAC to save typing time. RAC is an activity that characters may attempt while making camp. During RAC time, the characters laugh, sing, tell tales, and enjoy each other’s company. Each player describes his or her contribution to RAC, and that each character gets a Bearing-based Attribute Saving Throw. (Bearing is an ability score in THJ.) Character whose Saving Throw succeed receive “Advantage on a single Saving Throw of their choice on the following day.” That’s pretty cool. RAC fits nicely into the The Fellowship of the Ring feel of THJ, and it rewards roleplaying with a simple but potentially significant perk.

The Hero’s Companion expands on camp actions. Instead of RAC, a character may engage in one of these activities: Cover Your Tracks, Forage, Pious Devotion, Plan for Battle, Provide or Receive Instruction, or Scout the Trail. Most of these provide a short-term benefit similar to RAC. Provide or Receive Instructions requires more than one night in camp. If a character chooses one of these actions, the character forgoes the benefit of RAC in favor of another benefit. Gaining that benefit usually requires an Attribute Saving Throw. For example, a character who chooses Cover Your Tracks makes an Insight-based Saving Throw. If successful, those attempting to track the group have Disadvantage for the next 24 hours.

Adapting these to 5E D&D doesn’t seem too much of a problem. The first thing I’d do is remove the die roll. 5E D&D’s skill and saving throw system don’t seem well-suited to the way THJ does things. I’m also going to ignore the Provide or Receive Instruction option. That fits more in with 5E D&D’s Training downtime activity, at least thematically.

So, when 5E D&D PCs make camp (read: take a long rest), each PC gets a choice of one camp activity. The default activity is RAC. A PC who choose RAC gains the full benefits of a long rest as normal. Check the table for other activities. A PC who choose another activity may not recover his or her full hit points. The PC rolls all of his or her Hit Dice (as if taking a short rest). The total of the dice indicates the number of hit points recovered. Until the next long rest, the character has one few Hit Dice to spend during short rests to recover hit points.

Tags: 5E D&D, The Hero's Journey

On the Facebook, Luke Gygax posted, “Great job to Melf And The Green Arrows! Our Founders & Legends III Team broke the $6,000 mark! I’m so happy!”

Great job, indeed! I know my post about Founders & Legends III didn’t offer a glowing account of my limited experience with the on-line convention, but $6+K for Extra Life? That’s the icing on the cake and the cake, too.

On to another topic: It’s been months since I posted a new monster for AD&D. That doesn’t seem right. So, to honor the for-sale-via-Etsy tick horror, here we go.

Sceartán
Frequency: Very rare
No. Appearing: 2-12
Armor Class: 7
Move: 3″ (3″)
Hit Dice: 3-5
% in Lair: 5%
Treasure Type: Nil
No. of Attacks: 1
Damage/Attack: 2-5
Special Attacks: See below
Special Defenses: Nil
Magic Resistance: Standard
Intelligence: Low
Alignment: Neutral evil
Size: S
Psionic Ability: Nil
Attack/Defense Modes: Nil
Level/XP Value: 3 HD (III/80 + 3/hp), 4 HD (III/135 + 4/hp), 5 HD (IV/210 + 5/hp)

Sceartáns resemble bloated, fleshy ticks with the distorted faces of pudgy infants. They hunt forests, lairing in constricted burrows that some of the time lead to caves or caverns. These horrid things seek to drop upon prey or burst from hiding. They surprise others on a 1-4, and they treat falls as 20 feet shorter than actual for determining falling damage.

When sceartáns rush their prey, they double their movement rate for 1-4 melee rounds. Sceartáns attack via a long, hollow tongue that ends in a jagged spike. A hit by a sceartán scores 2-5 points of damage and indicates the monster has attached itself. Each melee round thereafter it drains 1-6 hit points of blood, until reaching satiation at a blood drain equal to its hit points. The sceartán then detaches and attempts to scurry for safety to slowly digest its meal. A sceartán must be killed, severely burned, or splashed with holy water to detach it prior to satiation. Holy water does not damage sceartáns, but they find the substance noxious.

If a sceartán is forcibly detached, its victim must make a saving throw versus poison. Failure indicates that part of the sceartán’s tongue spike breaks off in the victim’s body. The fragment wriggles deeper into the wound unless extracted within one melee round (causing 1-4 points of damage to the victim). Otherwise, only a cure disease spell prevents the fragment from reaching the victim’s heart and causing death in 1-3 turns.

Tags: AD&D, monsters

So, what with the meeting restrictions imposed by governments local and beyond, the game convention has gone the way of the dodo, but with the qualifier that perhaps the dodo will recover and waddle once again. Some conventions have moved to an online format. One of these is Founders & Legends, running the weekend during which I typed up this paltry review.

The Good

Curious to experience the online convention thing, I registered my son Christopher and me for the weekend. I’m not quite sure why I paid as much money to get through the virtual door as I would have to paid to get through a real door at a convention held in a facility somewhere, but, in fairness, I could have paid for a lower level of access, so that’s on me. Also, Founders & Legends has partnered with Extra Life, so some of the money spent goes to a noble cause. That’s a good thing, and kudos to the Luke Gygax team for supporting Extra Life.

The registration system via Tabletop Systems worked smoothly. In short order, Christopher and I were registered and signed up for two Adventurers League (AL) games, a sort of part one and part two of a continuing saga. We made up two 1st-level characters using AL guidelines, which are straightforward and pretty much exactly what the 5E Player’s Handbook says to do. Our characters, from start to finish, took about 15 minutes, all off-line the old-fashioned way, recording information via pencil on paper.

I found two pictures online to represent our characters and uploaded those via Discord to the DM, who turned the pics into tokens for use with Roll20. After this, we relaxed a bit, waiting for the first event’s beginning.

The events amused well enough. The situations the characters found themselves in were clear, and there was a good mix of roleplaying and action. The DM kept the game moving and used the Roll20 tools to keep things organized. While there were a few technical glitches (more on these in a bit), the Roll20 learning curve isn’t that steep (at least from the player’s side), and the same DM had the game running more smoothly during the second event.

I did have a few difficulties early on after registration. I’ve barely touched (metaphorically) speaking Discord. The virtual help desk and the DM proved most helpful for navigating the details of how to get the audio to work, how to access the correct channels, et cetera. The people working “at” the convention were polite and professional.

The Bad

Not everything we experienced with Founders & Legends evoked thoughts of puppies and ice cream sundaes. Fortunately, most of the bad was pretty much beyond anyone’s control.

Discord and Roll20 both had system wide crashes due to some sort of server or something. I’m far from the most technical person you can find, but I do know that both programs were inaccessible for about an hour. That said, the outage occurred after event one ended and before event two started, so it didn’t affect our convention experience. To paraphrase Suicidal Tendencies, it’s not a problem if it doesn’t affect me. We also had players in both sessions who got booted by Roll20 and/or erred with using Roll20, making communication somewhat inconsistent.

Discord was used for audio, which had a mandatory press-to-talk feature. My Discord settings had me designate a key (or combination of keys) on the keyboard that I had to press in order to be heard. When I stopped pressing the key, nothing on my side of the screen was audible. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but too often folks stopped pressing keys before they stopped speaking, especially during session one.

This meant that Christopher and I missed the last words of the DM’s statements. “The monster claws you, inflicting —” proves to be less informative than it needs to be. Another player saying “Can you move to —” does not convey the request. Unlike the system crashes, the press-to-talk problems were nothing other than human error.

The lack of video other than Roll20’s virtual battlemat bugged me. I didn’t particularly enjoy gaming with disembodied voices that I could only hear when the owners of those voices were pressing to talk. Most of human communication is body language and voice tone. With no video of the player’s faces, et cetera, the quality of communication necessarily degrades.

The Ugly

It’s been months, if not a year-plus, since Christopher and I have participated in Adventurers League. When we did, we did so solely to reunite with a long-lost gaming friend. (Hi, Don!) If Don had not been playing in the AL games, we’d have stayed home.

AL adventures, much like the earlier version Living City, occur within the Forgotten Realms, which must be popular, but with which I’ve never been a huge fan. Every AL and Living City adventure) I’ve ever played in or run shared a these characteristics:

1. An Almost to Totally Linear Structure
2. A Preponderance of Do-Nothing NPCs
3. Offenses against Player Freedom

Permit me to explain with reference to a Living City adventure I played in way back when at local gaming convention.

Our party of adventurers were hired as security for a dinner party. The Lords of Waterdeep attended. No character in our group had advanced past 4th or 5th level. The Lords of Waterdeep hired low-level characters for security. The Lords of Waterdeep, who often had double-digit levels in at least one class along the the magic items one would expect powerful characters to have, had no need of low-level guards, and yet there we were. Fine. Whatever.

Then, Trouble started, and the Lords of Waterdeep huddled in the ballroom and imperiously ordered our low-level characters go deal with the trouble. Any one Lord of Waterdeep could have solved the problems single-handedly, but Do-Nothing NPCs don’t solve problems. They do nothing unless interacted with, and then they stick to the script. They’re tabletop RPG versions of MMORPG shopkeepers.

Then, our characters moved from A to B to C. Each encounter ended with rails leading to the next encounter. Even being presented with a choice going from A to C doesn’t change this since C leads back to A, then to B, et cetera. Sure, this isn’t linear strictly speaking, but A becomes the center of a wheel with spokes and no rim. In another scenario, this one an AL adventure, the final act of the adventure was prescribed. Nothing our characters did at any point during the adventure would avoid or alter the final act. The adventure’s author dictated that the adventure end This Way Only.

Again, every single AL adventure I’ve run or played has these problems. The wiser DM retools the adventure’s structure to remove or at least reduce the severity of these problems, which are purely the result of bad adventure design.

The End

Would I participate in an on-line gaming convention again? Probably not.

Supporting a worthy cause such as Extra Life is a good thing to do, but I think my time and money would have been better used donating directly to Extra Life and spending time with Christopher (and perhaps my wife and daughter as well) doing something else. I don’t regret Founders & Legends, and I only experienced one small part of it, so it’s possible (even likely) that my experience was an anomaly.

Tags: Convention Gaming, reviews

Die rolls can be tyrants, and sic semper tyrannis.

Let me rant a bit about one thing about players in 5E D&D that makes me grind me teeth, starting with an example:

Player A: I search for secret doors along the north wall of the room.

(A die is rolled.)

GM: You don’t find a secret door.

Player B: I search too!

And, just like that, the game becomes a series of redundant skill checks as everyone at the table piles on, repeatedly assuming that their individuals characters know two things: (1) the last skill check failed and (2) there is a difference between failure and success for the skill check. Unless one enjoys the clatter of dice as several people each attempt to accomplish what someone else just attempted to accomplish, this sort of thing is not fun. (Nota Bene: Elsewhere, I’ve written about the pitfalls of clue hunting in a game. This isn’t a repeat of that. Well, at least not mostly.)

The GM’s Prerogative

Among the most important things a GM can do (and among the easiest thing for me as a GM to forget) is this simple rule:

No one gets to roll a die to determine success for anything unless I ask you to roll a die.

The GM’s job is to adjudicate the game, not merely to announce the results of die rolls made by the players. Dungeon World does a good job of making this explicit. (Nota Bene: That link goes to my Dungeon World products at DriveThruRPG.) Each player’s turn in Dungeon World goes something like this:

GM: Christopher, what does Hideo do?

Christopher: Hideo slides gracefully forward toward the ghoul. He grips his katana in one hand, his wakizashi in another. With his jaw set grimly, he slashes with the katana, steps to the side, and jabs with the wakizashi, trying to destroy the undead monster!

GM: Wonderful. Roll Hack & Slash.

(Dice are rolled. The results are narrated.)

Notice the dynamic. Christopher’s description of what Hideo does determines the nature of the die roll, not the other way around. 5E D&D should work this way as well. When I as GM ask a player what his character does, I really don’t want to hear, “I attack. I hit armor class fifteen.”

The same applies to skill checks. The player doesn’t get to announce, “I’m make a Diplomacy check!” or “I use Stealth!” The player narrates the character’s actions, thoughts, et cetera. Then, based on that description (and perhaps a minimum of out-of-character clarification), the GM decides what, if any, sort of check is required. A skill check may not be necessary, which brings me to my next subheader.

Fewer Die Rolls, Please

5E D&D characters tend to be competent at a minimum. They’re heroic, even at 1st level. Out of six ability scores, four have positive modifiers. One has a negative modifier. A 1st-level PC has a proficiency bonus of +2, which means that even with an 8 Charisma, a PC can still have a +1 bonus to Persuasion (for example).

Let’s take a look at my sorcerer, Evlis Pressed-Leaf, whom I run in our Sunday game. Evlis is 5th level and has an 18 Charisma. When he is Persuasive, he has a +7 bonus. The lowest roll Evlis can get on a Persuasion check is an 8. If he rolls a 3, he’s already succeeded at an Easy task. (See the adjacent table.) With a 10, he’s exceeded the DC for a Medium task difficulty.

5E D&D includes the idea of passive checks. A PC’s passive check total is a score equal to 10 + all of the modifiers that normally apply to the check. Evlis’s passive Persuasion score is 17. If Evlis has advantage for a skill check, his passive score increases by +5. With advantage, his passive Persuasion score is 22. For a lot his daily life, Evlis shouldn’t be making Persuasion checks, so why roll?

The point? If a PC’s passive score is sufficient to succeed, it’s probably a good idea to not bother with a die roll. The player narrates the action (as above), and the GM describes the result.

About Advantage & Disadvantage

As explained here, advantage or disadvantage does not strictly translate to a 5 point modifier to a d20 roll. The task difficulty affects how rolling 2d20 changes the probability of success or failure. Thus, the Advantage column on the Typical Difficulty Classes table. I can’t imagine using that column during regular game play, but it is instructive. For Hard task difficulty, advantage or disadvantage have little impact on the rate of success. For Easy and Medium task difficulties, advantage or disadvantage have a noticeable impact.

One thing to note is that working together (PH 175 and 192) pays off most in the 10-15 range of difficulties. Attacking with advantage against an AC 20 creature helps less than attacking with advantage against an AC 12 creature, which ought to be obvious.

Team Work

In the rules, working together is not the same thing as a group check. Evlis helping Longtum pick a lock is an example of working together. If the GM allows it, the thieves’ tools check is made with advantage. The same thing applies to two characters trying to smash down a door, et cetera. Working together ought to be fairly common, and, when combined with passive scores, goes a long way toward cutting down die rolls.

A group check is a different animal. Group checks are less common, and apply only to situations where the group succeeds or fails as a group. If four characters all search a wall for secret doors, that’s not really a group check. That’s an example of working together. A single success is all that is needed. Three out of four characters failing their checks don’t keep the fourth character from succeeding.

Back to the Beginning

Player A: I search for secret doors along the north wall of the room.

GM: Okay, but first, where is everyone else, and what are they doing?

Player B: I’m guarding the door on the other side of the room, watching the corridor to make sure nothing sneaks up on us.

Players C and D: We’re examining the locked chest.

GM: How?

Player C: I’m using my thieves’ tools to probe for traps.

Player D: Good idea. I’m nearby, sword and shield ready just in case it’s another mimic.

(Player A rolls a die.) Player A: I got a 19!

GM: I didn’t ask you to roll yet. First, describe what your character does.

Player A: Um, he gets close to the wall, pressing his cheek against, looking for irregularities in the surface while he runs his hands along the wall, feeling for the same, moving from the left side of the wall to the right.

GM: Make a Perception check.

Player A: (Rolls a die.) I got a 6.

Player B: I search too!

GM: No, you don’t. Your character doesn’t know what the die roll was, and he’s clear across the room, watching the corridor. (Compares the PC’s passive Perception to the approaching monster’s passive Stealth.) Suddenly, an emaciated humanoid lunges from the shadows, slashing at you with its ragged talons!

Player C: I shoot an arrow at it!

GM: No, you don’t. You’re busy with your thieves’ tools.

Et cetera.

Tags: 5E D&D, game play