Thursday, August 1st

The Daily Report

Well, given that it's summer, it had to happen sooner or later... the glorious streak of days in the 70s and nights in the 50s has come to an end. Yesterday the temperature broke 80 again it was still 72 in here at 2 in the morning. Temperatures are projected to peak tomorrow at a bit more than was originally forecast, too, but still well below 90.

It's a new month. Somehow with the move looming at the start of October, this feels less important a milestone than it usually does. My Amazon sales have reset, which is a bit less disconcerting now that I expect it, but with new releases on the way I'm not too worried that will last.

State of the Me

As you might have guessed from the fact that I know what temperature it was at 2 in the morning, I did not sleep as awesomely last night as I have other recent nights. Still okay.

Plans For Today

Today I'm going to finish copying book 5 for the second omnibus and do the internal linking on the second MU e-book (the table of contents and the links jumping between the chapters and their commentary. That's not actually a very full schedule, so I'm also going to take some time to do some random writing, or try to straighten out "Power Failure", or both... that's one area where I kind of have to let the muse lead. But I've been doing a lot of technical work since I got back and not a lot of writing, and I don't want to get stuck in that mindset completely.

D&D: Heroic House Rules

When I first got into D&D 4th Edition, I was excited because it came closer than any previous edition to giving the experience I'd always wanted from a roleplaying game, something that actually resembled the traditions of heroic fantasy that had inspired (and been inspired). Player character death was possible but rare and never completely random/unforeseeable, player characters were larger-than-life heroes who could perform incredible feats, and wizards used magic wands and staves as an integral part of their schtick and didn't have to lay down after every battle to turn into a wizard again.

The things I don't like about it mostly revolve around the way it's still stuck stuck in the model of earlier games. The fact that one-shot kills have been largely eliminated is good. The fact that missing is still the most likely outcome of most attacks isn't. The fact that players can pick the dramatic moment to use their hard-to-pull-off moves instead of relying on an 11% activation chance and failing most of the time is a significant improvement. The fact that they still have to roll to hit normally when they pull out the big guns and don't have any better than the normal about 40%-ish (been a while since I immersed myself in the numbers) hit chance is a bad thing.

(The designers clearly knew this, which is why most daily attack powers still do something on a miss. But this still lends itself towards anticlimax.)

The hybrid character class system? Great idea, great addition to the game. Exponentially increases the types of characters available... only not, because classes with wildly different attribute requirements are hosed by it.

Skill powers and optional racial utility powers? Add a lot of depth and color to the game. Except that you have to give up a class utility power to use them, and in a lot of cases the utility powers are where your class's flavor comes from... and while there are a lot of skill utility powers that you can look at and go, "Yes! Yes! This is the awesome kind of thing someone with larger-than-life tracking (or whatever) skills should be able to do!!", there aren't a lot that you'll look at and go, "This is superior (or even equal) to anything I could already choose at this level."

Of course, these sorts of things are a large part of why I'm working on A Wilder World, but D&D's always going to be a nostalgic favorite of mine. So I think a lot about what house rules I would use to rectify these.

The tediousness of combat, I would alleviate by making it so that heroes and important villains roll a d10 and add 10 to it for their hit rolls, instead of rolling a d20. The result is treated as the natural/raw die roll, so a roll of 10 counts as a critical. Result: Everybody on the battlefield would still take the same number of hits, on average, to drop (with a slight increase in deadliness due to crits being twice as common), but those hits would be spaced out wider. A player's tactical choices (i.e., where to use their encounter and daily powers) would matter more because the results of those choices would be more predictable.

Along those lines: encounter attacks have a +1, daily attacks have a +2.

(I might also have each player pick a skill to be their character's primary skill. Primary skills also benefit from the d10+10 rule. Rogues, Bards, and Artificers would pick two primary skills. Rangers would have their Dungeoneering or Nature pick plus one other of choice as primary skills.)

Solving attribute dependencies gets a little more complicated, but the way the game is played in the wild tends towards "sink attribute points where the game engine expects them to be and then roleplay the character you want to be regardless of stats" anyway. So I'd add two stats to the sheet: Primary Competency and Secondary Competency. The values of each would be +5 and +3, or +4 and +4, player's choice. Primary Competency would be subbed in for one attribute of your choice for purposes of attack rolls, class features, etc. Secondary Competency would be subbed in for all others. This does have the tendency to boost things that are clearly meant to be a tertiary attribute (as the Fighter's Wisdom-based abilities, or the Wizard's implement-dependent class features), but I'm not sure that giving a couple points' boost to a once-per-encounter thing like Wand of Accuracy would be a devastating change.

The progression for Primary Competency and Secondary Competency would both be based on the normal attribute progression with the assumption that you're raising the same two attributes every time you get to choose. You would also separately raise your actual attributes as normal.

As for the intriguing yet not necessarily "worth it" skill powers... the designers clearly understood the basic problem they presented because they added a feat that gives you a skill power, which suggests they understood that trading a utility power slot for a skill power would not seem like a good deal to most players. The problem is that 1) that doesn't go far enough and 2) most players wouldn't trade a feat for one, either. Especially since most skill powers, like a lot of the interesting utility powers, are totally situational... if the situation doesn't come up, you might as well not have it.

I think what they needed to do was just make skill powers an optional part of the progression... if you use them, you get them automatically in a second set of power slots. Obviously this makes characters more power, but they didn't care much about power creep when they added character themes to the game, or when they gave bards a set of "social cantrips" in Heroes of the Feywild. And no skill power is really game breaking.

So I would just make skill powers an automatic part of progression... I'm not sure exactly what rate I'd use, but I'd like to see something where the number of skill powers you have relates to the total number of skills you have, so that "skill monkey" characters get a little more razzle-dazzle out of that aspect of their character. The skill power slots could also be filled with utility powers taken from a theme or racial power set.

Obviously the upshot of these changes is that characters would be more effective/powerful (hit more often, have more efficient abilities, have more powers), but I don't think it would quite be enough to turn the game into God Mode, it would just do a bit more to emphasize that 4th Edition is already in Potential Demigod Mode.

I don't know that I'd go all-out and include the Competencies and extra skill powers for a group that's heavy on beginners or people who just don't care that much about customizing a character past the off-the-shelf versions, but I'm definitely using the d10+10 attack formula.

Also note that while skill powers are entirely an artifact of 4th edition, the d10+10 thing is portable to any d20-based game (and for that reason, I'm probably not the first person to propose it), and a version of Primary Competency/Secondary Competency could be used to solve multiple attribute dependency in earlier editions... though this might make multiclassing even cheesier in 3.X.

There's a good chance that any or all of these changes might open up holes that a dedicated char-op'er could drive a tank through, but these rule changes are meant to appeal to players who want the heroic stature experience without having to perfectly tailor their character choices for it.

Yeah, my math/memory was way off in my D&D post.

This is what happens when I randomly think of D&D after months of working on something else. I had my general impression that the hit rates were too low and I think what happened was my brain took that and conflated it with my memories of the last actual sessions I ran (which was with level 1 characters) and I was remembering the targets the players were trying to hit (level one opponents, typically 14-16) as the raw number they needed to roll rather than the modified number.

Which would have been completely ridiculous, instead of moderately ridiculous.

In fact, the actual hit rate is pegged pretty close to 50%, which sounds reasonable, but in practice missing as often as you hit can be discouraging, and I still believe it contributes to the feeling of combat as a slog.

As embarrassing as it is to have made this mistake, I'm kind of glad I did just because all of my combat models for AWW have been based around the assumption that equal opponents will have a 50/50 chance of hitting, and that's clearly something that I find dissatisfying in practice. AWW isn't based around the idea of equal opponents, but still, it happens, and a match between rivals should be exciting.

Maybe this is why I haven't really liked anything I've come up with? I read a statistic on a forum when I Googled to see if I was alone in having this impression (that 50% hit rates led to boring combats) that interest declines when the success rate is lower than about 66%. I don't know if that's true or not, but I have a simple tweak to the multi-dice system I'm working with now that would favor offense by about that ratio.