My Bruce Baugh's My D&D Year

Posted by Jim Henley on September 23, 2006 at 08:06 PM

One of the more enjoyable blogojournospheric endeavors to follow right now is Bruce Baugh's series, "My D&D Year," which as of today is up to 20 entries with approximately, one assumes, 360 or so pending. Bruce is using Rules Cyclopedia D&D, which can be had in PDF for a mere six bucks from RPGNow. He inspired me to buy it, if not to try to run it. And he's got me thinking of fast, easy and fun hacks to go with a dungeon-crawling game.

1. Frex, a la Dogs in the Vineyard, it should be possible to generate stats for an NPC fairly quickly if you roll eight dice at once and read them off in order three at a time. For instance, a roll of 6-1-4-3-5-5-4-1 could become

Str = 6 + 1 + 4 = 11
Dex = 1 + 4 + 3 = 8
Con = 4 + 3 + 5 = 12
Int = 3 + 5 + 5 = 13
Wis = 5 + 5 + 4 = 14
Cha = 5 + 4 + 1 = 10

and you're done with that part.

2. An alternate attribute method for chargen:
a. Each player rolls makes six (unassigned) attribute rolls and records them in a list, using the attribute rolling method of your choice (3d6, 4d6 keep 3, 2d6+6, roll 8 3d6 and drop the worst two, roll 4d20 and keep the second highest etc.)
b. Put all the lists on the table for examination. If there are four players - A, B, C, D - you have four lists.
c. The group chooses one list by consensus - for example, list C.
d. Each player uses the chosen list (C in our example) to assign attributes, placing the numbers where they will.

With the number of niches most OGL fantasy games have to fill, you shouldn't end up with most characters having the same scores in the same attributes. People will put them where it makes sense for their planned character class. The method would work especially well, I think, with Castles & Crusades "primes" system.

3. Reading my Rules Cyclopedia reminded me of the tradeoff between provisioning and mobility - do you want to load yourself down with a long list of dungeon-crawling or camping gear and leave little space for treasure little hope for quick movement or do you want to go light but risk being out of spikes or rope or 10' poles or whatever.

I don't really like the shopping and itemizing, but I like the tradeoff. So, as a house rule, how about turning Encumbrance into a kind of gadget pool? You've got your weapons and armor specified. That leaves you with a certain free carrying capacity in coins or whatever. You just say, I'm taking X coin worth of spelunking gear, paying some amount of money the Gm agrees is appropriate. Then when you need a spike or an extra torch or whatever, you roll d20 against the difficulty class of the item (preassigned); your mod is how much nonspecified Encumbrance you took on. (+1 per 50 coins? per 100? Whatever.)

Bruce has also got me thinking of my abandoned fantasy heartbreaker again. It'll run on the "Few20 Fantasy" system, which will be OGLish but designed for small play groups with limited playing time. Right now the Big Idea is that you roll Initiative, Attack and Defense as d20 plus mods - all at once. You match off dice after they're rolled, a la that famous gunslinger game we've already mentioned once in this post.