initiative without rolls

 

Happy new year! it feels like its been a long time without posting. Or maybe its just my feeling. This blog has been boosted like x 10 in visitors since Alex Schroeder mentioned me in his blog (its not like I had many before lol) and I should be making only hIgH qUaLiTy posts from now on. 

I want to take an entry to talk about my initiative houserule, and why I like it so much.

Basically, unless there is surprise, initiative goes to the side whose has the single member with more max HP, and only in case of a tie I randomize it.

Additionally to this, I don't do the "one side acts, then the other side acts" thought it would work perfectly I guess. I complicate it a little further by making the side who acts choose one member which acts (for the monsters, the GM chooses) and then, after the action, a member of the other side acts; and this goes on until everyone involved has taken its turn. Arrows and Spells can be shot reactivelly (spells require an armor-based roll to work in time) but doing so it consumes the turn of the shooter/caster.

I've been playing like this in my last campaign and I've accostumed myself a lot to it; to the point that I don't think I am going back. Combat is much more swift (much more combined with the "no damage, just take a Hit Die" houserule), and also it makes interesting effects in game: 

Having a Fighter in the party is suddently much more important. His instincts help everyone to take the lead on a fight, even if he doesn't fight himself: Maybe he just grabs the initiative so the thief can do something first. Tougher monsters are also scarier, because their sheer "speed". Suddently it also matters in which turn of the watch the monster appears: if the fighter is asleep, the monster can get a great advantage.

The "alternate sides" thing also adds an element of strategy for the players, something that its often missing from combat when a game makes the fights a little bit abstracted. Using this (also abstract) ways to control combat gives PCs more buttons to press which, in my opinion, adds a +1 to old D&D.

Sometimes I like to distinguish swords from the other weapons because they add a little bonus to HP only for initiative purposes. They are the weapon of heroes after all.

And thats it. 

I want to note that it is also possible to make a much more gamist initiative without rolls, and I found out by playing pokémon this last weeks.

In the GBA games, initiative works like this: both trainers choose their movement at the same time, then the pokemon with most speed acts first. Stats are very granular, so having a tie is very rare.

Certain movements have priority over others, regardless of speed. For example, taking a potion or changing pokemon goes always before any attacks (there is but one attack AFAIK that specifically strikes before retiring the pokemon). Some attacks have a "quick" tag that makes them go before the enemy, and there are slow attacks too, which work the opposite way.

It could very easily be ported to tabletop by assigning a sort of speed stat (dexterity is the easiest) and then listing which kind of actions have priority over others. This very choice can lead to very different combat systems and tones (for example, if healing has priority over attacking, if spells go first or last, etc). 

Offtopic: If you speak or understand spanish and like the game, I reccomend you this awesome Team Rocket Edition hack by Dragonsden. You play as a Team Rocket recruit acting parallel to Red and Blue in the original Game Boy games. The lore of the game is so good that its really a pity that its not "official", I am really enjoying it!

[review] Pokéthulu; my first game as GM ever

Little by little that need of making this review grew on me. This is a 19 year old game, with 0,0 active fanbase or discussion nowadays, but that I have very fond memories of. It was the very first game I ever GMed. I remember I convinced my friends to play rpgs around 2009 or so, and when they said yes, I went home and printed it on a whim to play that very afternoon. I read the manual as I went, and used the introductory adventure hooks at the end of the book (it was 20 pages or so) to improvise a campaign. I let everyone draw their first pokemons and we started. I don't remember many details, but I remember some. 

I drew a handful of pokethulus in a few minutes. I just sketched some shits on a paper, then added lightning, horns, extra eyes, extra anythings, fire, water, wings, tails and random weirdnesses and they were perfect. I was into the mythos while my players weren't; but I made a lot of references to them anyways, with one of the toughest pokemon being straight up ripped from Hellsing's Baskerville (one of the PCs captured without combat, with a lucky roll of a pokéball throw). There was a mechanic that incorporated making up quotes for the pokethulu fictional show in exchange for ¿successes? but we did away with that completely.

deviantart: geistvirus

The game describes itself as a joke game, but it manages to accomplish a lot of things right. Common checks for humans are d12 roll under, with easier tasks giving you more dice to roll, while thulhu combat is really cool while remaining simple. Each thulhu has up to two types (decomposing, fishy, fungous, icy, luminiscent, non-euclidean, squamous, sticky), a weakness to one of those types and three stats: power, speed and hit points. You have four choices for attacks: injure, dodge, trap or frighten. Each of them has a type adequate to the thulhu  and a number from 1 to 3 d12 to roll, under power or speed. 

The cool part is that you get to name/invent the nature of the attack, depending on the attack and its type. For example, the game lists Shub-Polywrath having a Non-Euclidean, frighten attack of 3d12. It is called Chest Swirl Display of Infinity. Mechanically it doesnt matter much: you'd roll 1d12 extra against targets who are weak to Non-Euclidean. But it is cool to know that if you choose to use your pet monster to frighten a clerk on some shop and succeed, the clerk is going to freak out gazing at infinity in the thulhu's spiral. There is a mechanical part which carries the rules, but is an analog, player made name which creates the effect. This is something that inspired me a lot and made the game very very easy to run. (The 3rd edition has an "official" pokethulu list, but when I downloaded it first there wasnt any, only a few examples)

I went as far as to implement Mythos-type magic when a PC found a forbidden book at the evil guy's lair. I gave his character a page with three spells that he could cast at anytime, each one once. I remember one of the spells "just" summoned a rain of blood. It was the kind of game that doesn't break for things like that. You can even play with the existing codes and give objects, places, people, etc types and weaknesses, such an squamous necklace or a fungous-averse library. But am digressing.

It is astonishing how well both of the settings mixed (pokemon and the mythos) answered the questions opened by the other. I have talked before on how Lovecraft's mythos are a great setting but hardly playable in my opinion in in a serious campaign. This joke game allowed me to play with them in a way that Call of the Chtulhu could not offer to me. In CoC, the King in Yellow is a book you read and makes you lose sanity, but you cannot really bring more info to your players about the city of Carcosa, the lake Hali or the King itself, as they are not described even in the books. You can only roleplay how your character goes slightly mad little by little. In pokethulu, you can rule that the King in Yellow is a book that allows passage to tattered Carcosa, where you can meet amd challenge the King into combat, steal some eldritch items and maybe capture some horrible fish type critters at the lake Hali.

On the other hand, it takes Pokèmon to its logical conclusions: What happens when pokemon turn against man? they eat their souls and marrow. Why kids get pokemon? because the world is hard and its always cool to have a friend with the destructive power of a nuke. Why only kids? Because you need a high sanity score to deal with thulhu and most adults (exception being some cultists) have a sanity score of 1. 

The implications of a world where the kids hold a power like that while adults cannot handle this madness and pretend that all this pokethulu thing doesnt exist is really really poetical, almost sublime. It fixes all the problems that modern-based fantasy settings have on a single strike, and I want to go back to this on further entries. 

suddently, all my art folder looks like pokethulhus

On the bad side, it is true that the rules gave some trouble eventually. I don't remember exactly what happened, but we found a way to break the game easily; maxing out speed + trap or speed + dodge or something like that. I think it wasn't hard to fix. I am re-reading the rules right now, after all this years and having discovered the old school D&D, and I cannot help thinking on how I would change this or that rule; lots of great ideas. 

* Stats for humans being rolled (1d12 with 9-12 defaulting to 4 instead of point buy). Buying stats at 11 or 12 made the characters auto succeed at everything from the start.

* human attacks (and other checks) being 1 dice only, lucky ability allowing 1 extra die + 1 extra if the task is easy or using an appropiate weapon or something, or taking advantage of somebody's weakness.

* Implementing hex travel, rations and pokethulu's travelling speed

* Statting pokethulhus a little lower; having 6d12 among attacks at the start for the some of the first owned pokemons is totally enough. We did it like this if I remember well.

I ram him with the bowsprit! you throw the pokeball!

I must say that the game has always been free to download, but the official web seems down, who knows since when. You can get it HERE, and there is also a web with resources in HERE. Nobody seems to know or have played this game, but from my humble blog I'd like to reccomend it to you all.

Edit: Some related link about somebody wanting to make a pokemon campaign focused on exploration.

sometimes, the line between what counts as a 

pokethulhu or a trainer is very thin. I could 

make this guy into both sides with little effort.

A spell list of pokemon moves

 

One of my long carried over projects is to make a game or D&D adaptation whose entire spell list is taken from pokemon. Basically to take the list of Gen 1 - pokèmon moves (back from when there were 151 of them) and rework them into spells. 

Many of them are explicit on their effects (flamethrower). Some of them might require some explanation, and some of them, which are redundant (Thunder, thunder punch, thunder shock, thunder wave and thunderbolt), can be reworked into more interesting things, so they are the place in which I can get creative with non-combat effects (for example, thunder wave might be used to magnetically seal a gate or whatever)

The great thing about this is that it feels a really new start, not based in the D&D list, to make magic fresher and personal. At the same time it has some constraints that, far from being adverse, are always the greatest helpers when building something great.

Interestingly, it allows for a very elemental-esque approach to magic, with all spells having someone that is vulnerable or resistant to it. One can make monsters based on elements, or trying to figure out to which pokemon element do D&D monsters belong. 

PC casters should not be elemental per se (they are treated like type: normal unless belonging to a specific race, like merfolk or harpies) though they can become elemental under certain circumstances (some spells or items, maybe?). Another good way to "pokemonize" this casters is to allow them to learn only moves of 2 different types, (beyond type:normal). Maybe monks can also work this way, by learning moves of type:fighting.

In the list I linked the moves are labeled as physical (causes physical damage) status (causes status alters, might be sort of magical) or special (more magical in nature). This and the movement type are to be respected a priori, though I might change my mind.

 

I find it very interesting that in the pokemon games there were no Dark and Holy types (though they added Dark shortly afterwards). This sort of paints the world as having no definite law and chaos, just a very strange and wild nature. Also there are oddly specific types like bug, ghost and three types of earth related elements (plant, ground and rock; with steel being added in the later generations). So there is no way to play a cleric in the usual version we know about. If we count them as being "those who drive ghosts away", a quick glance at the chart shows us that only other ghosts are super effective VS ghosts :/

Which element do you feel that a healing spell would belong to?
Which types would you grant to a medusa?