How I do Treasure Types

 

This is the B/X table for generating monster treasure. I assume that Gygax intended to use it when you are generating dungeons, at home, chilling alone with a cup of tea: It has a ton of rolls to do. Some of them are even PERCENTILE. 

I found myself having to generate treasure a lot of times during the game. Also I strongly dislike having so many types of coin: I only use silver (the standard) and gold coins (armor and other specific things are still keeping their gold prices). Copper is a nuisance and electrum can go fuck itself. I don't even want to know what the fuck it is, but it is surely something I don't want everywhere around on my fantasy world. 

I spent a lot of time calculating the averages of each treasure type. Someday I found out casually that they were already calculated for me, right at the preceding page:

To give it a little randomization, multiply the result according to this table. Note that I use silver standard, so that is the value in silver for me.

1 - 25% treasure
2 - 50% treasure
3 - 75 % treasure
4 - 100 % treasure
5 - 150% treasure
6 - 200% treasure

The numbers add to 600%, divided by six results so its 100%. This means that stastically the treasure amount doesn't change.

Then I roll 1d6 in this other table: The treasure is composed mostly of..:

1 - Gold coins (value as 10 silver coin each)
2 - Gems and jewelry. Depending on my mood this can be a single jewel or a myriad of small gems
3 - Valuable but small items (books, weapons)
4 - Valuable but bulky items (armor, statues, art)
5 - Silver coins
6 - Silver coins

For bigger treasures I divide the treasure into 2, 3 or 4 roughly equal parts and roll separately for each part.

Magical items are rolled normally but I approximate the results with d6. Not because I cannot roll percentile, but is a question of principles (for example, a Type A treasure with a 30% chance of magic treasure becomes 33% chance: 2 in 6). Percentile rolls feel ugly in D&D and the exact numbers are arbitrary after all.

EDIT: for convenience, I also calculated the averages of unguarded treasure rooms per dungeon level:

level 1: 158 gp

level 2 or 3: 483 gp

level 4 or 5: 1553 gp

level 6 or 7: 3205 gp

level 8+: 6256 gp

Average value of 1 gem: 194 gp 

Average value of 1 jewel: 1050gp

Avoid the balance

twitter: pixelartjourney

I've realized that I am really averse to game balance. I can understand the importance of it in some kind of games (computer or strategy games, for example, need all their factions to be balanced so they all remain viable) but I think that its a concept that is erroneously ported to tabletop rpgs causing only confusion and evil. 

I love unbalance in character creation. There is a dogma in the OSR that you cannot put too much mechanical weight on ability scores, because they are randomly generated. But that is not really aligned to B/X at all! 

A simple +1 in strength is +1 to hit AND damage! if we consider the classic conversion of every damage +1 becoming a +2 to-hit bonus, this means that a slightly stronger level 1 fighter hits as hard as a level 4 one. And that is just a +1. Providing you sell your INT or WIS to increase your prime attribute to +1, you will then be in disadvantage to the guy who rolled that +1 and did the same to reach +2 or +3

What about dexterity? it modifies both ranged to hit and AC. Getting a good dexterity sure makes a difference; so does a good constitution. Even rolling your first HD for hit points can make for a big difference: 1d8 hp can make you a 1 hp loser or a 8 hp guy that can withstand carelessly a sword thrust. 

The very "starting money" roll can decide if you start with the best armor in the game or just a shield. 

I like when some characters are stronger than others. Its okay. I think that the perceived importance of balance is that it allows everyone to have something to contribute equally at the table. But this is actually a mirage. The labor of GMs and games is not to give every character equal power: that would not even be possible, if we get deeper into that: Who's got more power? the character that can fight very well or the one that has a red hat? Well, you can say that fighting is more important, but that really depends on the setting. Maybe the campaign has no perspective of fights, but instead features a tribe of minotaurs that are hypnotized everytime they see something red. We cannot know. 

And that is ok too.

You can balance the thief vs the fighter, but for it to be meaningful, you have to make a campaign where there is as much important fights as there are locked doors to be picked. And, at that point, that presumed balance is shown to be a mantained illusion.

I made this houserules sometime ago, where all classes are dismantled and the weight is put on the ability scores, and they work. A high roll in constitution at the start makes you as capable of a level X fighter, both in attack bonus and health. A high roll in dexterity makes you a very competent thief. The only thing that remained tied to level was saves and XP necessary to level up. And some of the lowest rollers were just normal fighters and thieves and wizards. And everybody was ok with it. It is true that attributes could be raised over time with a roll-under mechanic, so the highest attributes were harder to raise, but that is more about a feeling of justice than about balance. 

When we played the Street Gang game, there was characters that were terribly unbalanced with others in combat, as there were some who picked a lot of useless skills (it was part of the fun). But balance, as everything does, also tends to sprout itself from its opposite. In an imbalanced party, balance appears very quickly: For example, the one that tends to fight better, also tends to fight more, thus, putting him or herself at risk much more than the ones that fight worse. This makes him much more likely to die fighting than a non-combatant in the long run.

In the same way, a thief is much more likely to be caught pick-pocketing than a character that doesn't know how to pickpocket in the first place: the skill is a skill and a curse, because an adventurer party is not composed by isolated peoples: it is ideally a group in which everyone pools their abilities together. There is balance in asking the tank to lead the way, or in refusing to accept a part in a plan if you feel that you don't have enough HP, skill, etc to succeed at it; and you propose a different approach instead.

Merry wasn't balanced at all with Legolas, yet both of them played an equally important part in their adventure. Legolas killed a lot of people in the battle of the Pelennor Fields, yet the one kill that Merry achieves alongside Eowen is the one we all remember better. It is not about giving your PCs the same firepower, be it real firepower, magic or thieving firepower. It is about putting them on an equally compelling situation and giving them the freedom to act as they see fit, inside their capabilities. You cannot fight the orcs as well as an elf archer? well, maybe you can try to negotiate with the ents. You don't need levels on anything for that! 

The worst kind of balance is like in 4e/5e and other modern games, when the balance is done blatantly around combat. I understand that you do that in a game that is solely about combat, but D&D is much more than that. You can argue that it is about retrieving treasure. But beyind that, it is about living adventures in a strange fantasy world. By balancing around combat, you are letting combat swallow the whole.

I remember some idea I had for running Searchers of the Unknown. I didn't knew why I liked it then, but I know why now. That game has no classes (just one: adventurer) or attributes whatsoever: the only difference among characters was the amount of HP rolled and your name. I devised some d6 table like this:

6: You start with 4000 XP (level 3). You are also cursed. The first time you get a natural 20 you will miss the roll instead.

5: You are a veteran: start with 2000 XP (level 2)

3-4: You start as normal

1-2: You are a kid: start with 1000 negative XP. You need to get those to get to level 1, and you have -2 hp until then. In exchange, you can once per life turn any roll into a success. 

I never ran SotU in the end, but it gives you an idea on how a little imbalance can be used to create nice dynamics on a game. What does it give that a character is more powerful than the rest? they are a team after all. Somebody being stronger is beneficial to every single one of them, because they can have powerful Aragorn who leads them and assumes greater risks in behalf of everyone. And at the same time, the same high capacity of their member can take the PCs into places too dangerous believing that their tank can carry them, until the tank dies or is wounded and they must carry their body back to the surface, through a zone that is 2 levels beyond them.

Note that the automatic success and the curse will only function once: they are secondary: ornamental complements to the real reason: this creates much more interesting in-game dynamics, assigns natural roles and draws much more potent images in the player's mind than just "you are 4 very similar fighters". 

If, for the contrary, they have a weakling on the group, they can still play around it searching for non-combat approaches, interacting with the game world, taking risks and try to improve with time, and even use their one-time roll in an epic moment, representing the victory of their raw innoncence. Because thats how a good "imbalance" is done: limiting an aspect of the character, but not in a way that stripes the game of the fun. If possible, do the opposite. 

B/X Monk

Monks are humans who train their body, mind and spirit for the sake of beating other punks improving themselves, and their belief that those trainings are complementary. Not really skilled in the arts of combat as war, like a Fighting man would, but can sometimes outperform them on certain conditions. Their prime requisite, if you really need that (I don't use them) is Wisdom.

Thry cannot use armor; save for certain special armors specially suited to their arts which consist mainly on a set of bracers, shin guards and pauldrons (+1 to +2 AC, depending on the quality). Their AC will go up as they level, anyways, representing the monk getting better at avoiding hits.

Monks have a d6 Hit Dice and XP/Attack/Saves as Cleric, and do 1d4 damage when unarmed. When they use small weapons (those that would normally deal 1d4) they deal 1d6 instead.

Monks can use any weapons, but can use their Counterattack ability only when unarmed, or using nunchucks or staves (the latter makes you drop initiative as per the Variable Weapon Damage B/X rules, but allows you +1 attack bonus on counterattacks). Other monkish weapons can appear in the monk's path, but these are the only ones which are available at the start.

SPECIAL MONK WEAPONS take the form of an improvement of the punch, typically gloves, claws or cestus. They give you +1 to hit when unarmed and do not improve damage. Its easier that way.

COUNTERATTACK is conceptually based in the Final Fantasy monk: When attacked in melee, an monk that hasn't spent his turn, be it because the enemy has the initiative or because he has chosen to held his action, can preemptivelly attack first. On a succesful hit, deal damage as usual, and the enemy attack is also deflected.

You can see the enemy roll before you choose to counterattack, and you can counterattack infinite times per turn, providing you dont die, get stunned, trip or something like that.

This is also an additional defense that complements their low AC at first levels (though only versus melee attacks) and could be a risky form of crowd control. It's the classic kung-fu scene in which Bruce Lee defends himself against a lot of mobsters.

Using a dagger won't give you any bonus, but your enemy might get scared of you. Even goblins know that punch damage is likely to be non-lethal at the discrection of the GM, but a knife is another story

SECRET TECHNIQUES can only be used when unarmed (no nunchucks no staves this time). These are abstracted by giving you one extra die from the plethora of the common dice sets (d4 to d20): when an attack is succesful and you do damage, you can roll a secret technique and add its damage to it, then the die is expended. These are only refreshed at downtime, or very slowly during the adventure: Whenever you rest, you roll all your exhausted dice: if any of them shows a 1, you recover it.

Level Progression

Level 1: 

Counterattack, 

Technique: 1d4 (some sort of high kick, maybe)

You can double your normal movement per turn by passing a petrification save; on a fail you must still move the normal amount.

Level 2: 

Technique: 1d6

AC +1

Level 3: 

Awareness (only surprised on a 1)

You take half damage from missiles and dragon breath effects, and can save for no damage at all.

Level 4:

AC +1

Your unarmed base damage becomes 1d6

Level 5:

Your fists can harm enchanted creatures at -2 (reduce this penalty for each Wisdom modifier)

Technique: 1d8

Level 6:

AC +1

You get access to a spell: Magic Missile, Mirror Image, Levitate, or any appropiate spell your GM gives to you. You can cast it at will by passing a save vs spells, with a failure being that you spend your turn for no effect. I'm not sure about this one and I think I should make an actual spell list for the monk.

Level 7:

Technique: 1d10

If you are lawful, you can turn undead

If you are chaotic, you can make enemies of less your hd save vs death when they are hit.

If you are neutral, it's a good time for you to choose your alignment

Level 8:

+1 AC (you have armor as chainmail by now)

Maybe another spell

Level 9: 

Technique: You get the other 1d10 (the one with the tens). You can use this die to damage or to heal yourself at anytime by the amount rolled.

At this point you can make a dojo and attract followers as cleric

Level 10:

+1 AC

You can increase any attribute score by +2 (in order to get those cool bonuses. STR, DEX or WIS are probably the ones you want)

Level 11: 

Technique: 1d12

Level 12:

+1 AC. Immunity to Geas and Quest spells 

Your base unarmed damage is now 1d8

Level 13: 

Technique: 1d20. You can at this point try to take down really big monsters with a single punch

Level 14:

+1 AC. Your naked AC is equivalent to a knight in shield and full plate

Level 15: 

Technique: You get an additional 1d20, or an 1d30 if you can provide one.

Level 16:

+1 AC

and unarmed you might deal less damage per turn, but you can use your asploding techniques at any moment

Five VS three VS one: Saving throws

First we have the classic five:

Death/poison

Wands

Paralysis, petrification

Breath attacks

Spells, rods, staves

- They look like omens on your character sheet. They put you into the mood of what the game is about.

- The saves are disconnected from actual traits of your character in-game. Your fighter doesnt train really hard to be resistant to Spells, he just does it somehow, which is ultimately up to the GM to narrate.

- If you think about it, saves represent how likely is your character to get plot armor. The Death Ray is not supposed to fail a % of the time, it just fails when it strikes your character because it suits the plot. There you find that D&D has a narrative side under its naturalistic appearance. Which is OK.

- As a good plot armor device, they increase only with level. This means that the more you play a character (the more invested they have been in the story) the more protected they will be from unwanted disasters. Sometimes, of course, the save fails.

- Though they sound cool, some effects can be hard to adscribe to those categories. Here is a guide, in which it is described how they are ordered from easy to hard, based on how lethal and telegraphed the effects are (because Gygax cares for you). BUT in my opinion, there is a lot of work and text space dedicated to saves in the book, while the differentiation between the highest and lowest saves are not very meaningful (+4 in the greatest cases). There are whole matrixes dedicated to check which is the save of a certain class, at a certain level, for a certain danger; and at which levels should they ever change. This makes it seem like there is an intended and important order for this, while the impact on the actual game is relativelly low. One could think that this granularity is excessive, and, while is not hard to check a number on a chart, ponder if it pays off. 

- Sometimes attribute bonuses might modify certain rolls. Many people is against it, but I feel that its just a small bonus after all and it helps to establish game reality: it is just tangible that a character with good dexterity can use its bonus when the save is reflex-dependant. As an alternate view, I was using a certain retroclone recently (Aventuras en la Marca del Este) which gave the Wisdom modifier as a bonus to ALL saves. Not bad idea at all in my opinion: wisdom is often despised unless one is a cleric, and though the increase in saves might be small, the increase in character depiction is huge: Your character is not just a faceless level 1 stick figure: its a moderately wise guy which happens to be 5% better at saving: that makes you start the game like a 70s pimp

The three saves (Fortitude, Reflex and Willpower) came later.

- They are level-independant, relying on attributes. Into the Odd (using strength, dexterity and charisma) went as far as removing the levels completely. This makes them more naturalistic and easy to adscribe to effects.

- This, on the other hand, removes the concept of saves as plot armor. This is the greatest departure point, in my view. You don't have to come up for a reason to "why" or "how". You also can't, because the save does it for you. Its an upside and a downside at the same time. Into the Odd, again, solves this on a very clever way: Strength is about enduring physical stress, Dexterity about reacting fast and Charm encompasses plot armor, as being a measure, among other things, of how much blessed you are. So you can always fall back on that to factor plot armor back into your rules.

- They are usually mocked on the OSRsphere mainly because they put weight on the attributes and because they don't scale with level (edit: as pointed by JEL in the comments, in 3e the saves do scale with level. I don't know to which extent as all my 3e knowledge is second hand). It is true that I don't think that they can be used as "roll d20 under this to save". The numbers are just too high: Level 1 characters with normal stats would save most of the time. Would be a joke. Into the Odd, AGAIN, solves this on a clever way by introducing attribute damage: certain attacks decrease your attribute scores, and then force you to save under them. I like how Chris McDowall has taken its way into exploring the three saves into a very fruitful design, turning them into attributes themselves.

- As the "don't scale with level" thing: we'll, that is a bad idea if we see saves as plot armor. But if we see it as a naturalistic simulation, it's ok. In the end they work if you are conscious on what kind of story you are emulating. 

The Single Save is a number that increases with level. 

- The number can be universal or fixed by class. A good example of it is Swords and Wizardry (class based) among the retroclones, and Pits and Perils if you go a little beyond that (universal, though dwarves get a bonus).

- This is freeing enough that you can give or take small bonuses on an easy way. It is easier to write on your sheet a single number with "+2 vs magic", like S&W does with Magic Users, than five of them, and then decide which one apply everytime. You can give each class a bonus to a specific situation: +2 vs death to clerics is also on S&W. +2 to reflex rolls to thieves? sure, just say it so. The best of the single save is that you don't have to come up with categories of saves prior to play. You can specify as much or as little as you want: You can make an amulet of +2 vs Sleep, for example; or a cheap charm of +1 vs storms, and drop them on your treasure.

- On the "saves as plot armor structure", it works perfectly without having to separate plot armor by "categories vs classes" that might have sense for Gygax, but seem arbitrary to me.

- You can set saves at a middle point between death (low) and spells (high) and just give +2 to -2 bonuses on specifics, using the classic saves as reference or set by you.

- You can also add attribute modifiers to it (from dex, cha, etc) in the same range of modifiers without it altering too much the math, but in a meaningful way, that makes players feel that their dexterity or charisma actually work.

- Single save is the best and everybody knows

and tomorrow, I will (try to) write how I am doing saves now in D6D  A.K.A. Trow Fortress. Thanks for reading!

EDIT: there is still another way to make this: with ZERO saves.

Monks and Mummies: Advancement. v2

As the game begins, players are given a communal sheet with some questions and some milestones. 

This set of questions can be answered at anytime to turn a failed roll into a max result. The answer must relate to the problem you are facing somehow; and can be spent to change the roll of an ally too, if the question allows it. Example: "What was that important lesson you received from your master?" can be used for yourself or for any other PC if you are willing to consider him a master, or if you yell that lesson aloud so you can inspire that character.

You can only answer about YOUR character past, and if there are players who have answered less questions than you, you must wait for them to catch up so everybody can use this. You can interpret the questions however you like. If your character is not even a martial artist, you can say that his photography classes were his dojo, or something like that.

Once a question is answered, it can't be used again by any other player. These mechanic gives the PCs some plot armor during the early game, and the answers help the GM to picture the world the players have in mind, and to bring back the past of the characters into the plot. 

_ What was that important lesson you received from your master?

_ What is the emblem/motto of your dojo? And when you get some time, what is the story behind it?

_ Why must your troubled ally not give up?

_ What did you do to earn your living in the past?

_ What promise did you made and to who?

_ How brutal was your training? like, what is the most fucked up shit you did?

_ What made you undertake your training at all?

_ What thing or person do you despise most?

_ What have you always be ashamed of, but might be useful now?

_ What dream burns in your head / what passion burns in your heart?

This set of milestones can be checked at the end of each session by each PC: If you managed to do at least one of them, write yout initial on it and advance. If you did many of those during the session, you must choose only one. You cannot mark a milestone twice, but you can get liberal about their meaning. Your GM has the final word, as always. Different PCs can mark the same milestone if they want to.

_ I've helped an NPC with his first world problem

_ I've passed a master's test and endured his training

_ I've found some treasure that is beyond mere gold

_ I've defeated somebody in an honorable duel

_ I've fought an infernal beast

_ I've solved a crime

_ I've stood for my beliefs even when it was risky to do so

_ I've mantained the honor of my dojo

_ I've funded a dojo and taught some students

_ I've righted a wrong the best I could

_ I've performed my profession to make a great work

_ I've made an even greater work

_ I've retrieved big treasure

_ I've retrieved an even bigger treasure

I will probably edit when I come up with better options

The cool parts of Blades in the Dark [review?] and more on Fire Elixir

I could post the logo of the game but I feels this one explains better the mood of the game. This is a mood blog after all.

I respect John Harper a lot as a designer. It's not that I love everything he makes, but I do find that he is among the rare people who knows what he wants to achieve in a game, dares to go beyond certain assumed borders, and aims to make it make sense through all of it. I just read Blades in the Dark because I believed it could help me finishing the other half of this rules. Turned out it was a great idea.

This is going to be a long post. 

You might remember that previously in this blog I divided game rules into two: Core Rules (those that deal with guiding the game pace correcly, creating game loops and generating content) and Resolution Rules (those that arbiter how well the PCs perform); from which the former are the ones that really carry the game and the latter, while they can be good or bad, are lesser in importance.

Well, BITD resolution is nothing new: Some sort of the classic "roll Xd6, highest result determines outcome, partial successes abound", with a freaking amount of Attributes and Skills (called "actions") and Moves. Too much for my taste. 

On the other hand, and this is one of Harper's strengths, the game's Core Rules look very very fine. That alone makes this game very valuable: apart from OSR games, its very hard to find games that have Core Rules at all. And if in D&D those rules are:

You must level up > XP is taken from treasure mostly > there is this dungeon stocking procedures that generate both monsters and treasure, get in the dungeon > level up so you can get into deeper dungeons;

in Blades in the Dark we find another consistent game-driven loop:

make heist/achieve turf  > get (or lose) REPutation > increase band's tier, alongside a lot of debris and side-effects which generate more possible heists, or alternativelly expand your gang into more districts to get rep, resources and powerups. 

I had attempted to do the "Gang Character Sheet" before in my games, as in making a sheet for the gang itself with its own stats and stuff, but never really found a way to use it that made sense. I think that this is also the second big success for this game. Your gang sheet decides which cohorts (NPC armies) you can use and how powerful are they; how likely you are to get hold or produce certain resources, influence or fight other gangs, how many Vice Dens you have and how much Coin they apport, which communal skills does the gang bestow on its members (for example, I liked that a gang of assassins can develop a feat so their members increase their Insight or Prowess beyond human scope, so it explains how to do ninja related stuff, etc)

I think that the game would benefit a lot from cutting off the character creation options (which tend a little towards the "snowflake" PC) in favor of making them faceless pawns with one or two distinctive traits and putting them under the mantle of their gang's benefits (which, starting at Tier 0 would be very small). The bulk of the advancement should go to the gang, while giving the characters little advancement its OK: This is first and foremost good for the game: You are more disposed to put your character in risk if your investments are really more on the gang itself than in the PC. It is also good for the fiction, as the gang life is dangerous and PCs getting plot armor works better on epic types of fiction, but not so much in the noir. 

More things I love: On my homebrews I always like to implement quantum elements: That is: when you leave things undecided in a quantum state, and you decide during the game what has happened in the past. For example, I like that new PC Wizards can decide the spells they learn during the game, so they dont pick void options, and until then its a "nameless level 1 spell". When they choose magic missile, the fiction decides it was always a magic missile, and they keep that spell from now on. Or the (now classic for me) quantum pocket: You have an ability to produce an object that you were always carrying, but you decide it at that very moment. Normally that object must pertain to a family of objects (a doctor can produce a specific medicine, or a commoner can produce anything that can be bought in a small shop). BITD takes this towards the extreme edge, and i LOVE IT:

PCs are thrown into the score, with no preparation beyond their initial approach to the mission. They have a given load number: up from there, they can produce as much items as they want during the heist, but each time they do it, the item is now tracked. But there is more: the flashback mechanism allows you to do your heist preparation completelly in retrospective: Basically when you find some obstacle (let's say you find a guarding dog while sneaking through the garden) you spend some strain (one of the game's economy points) to say how did you prepare against it (maybe you spend a fucking month befriending that dog so it wouldn't attack you?) and if the outcome is uncertain you roll to see how well you did your preparation (on a bad roll, the dog was just pretending to be your friend so he could fuck you up tonight, dude. Who cons the conman?)

Those are, of course, mere simplifications of a more complex ruleset. Too complex for my tastes, actually. The game is an authentic leviathan of 300+ pages in small letter, and to my rules light mind, it could be surely be purged from half of it. Its not about the page count, but I think that it has a lot of layers of metacurrencies running around (reputation, coin, trauma, clocks, strain, tiers, skills, actions, moves, approaches, etc). Really, this might seem like heresy, but as I was reading I was like: "nah, I will ignore strain altogether. Spending strain to flashback? nahh just allow 1 flashback per character and maybe some more if they get a critical or have a relevant skill". But I don't want to say the game is bad for that. It's just part of my personality to modify and simplify according to my taste. I am a practical man. And I love that the game is as it is, because that means I can use it to work out my own version.

Have you heard of this gang of shadows?

To finish up, I'd like to talk a little about the setting. Doskvol is a victorian mix of Venice, London and Prague, where the sun is dim and there are evil ghosts all around. The city is protected from the horrors that lurk outside by a electrical barrier that runs on leviathan oil (leviathans themselves are horrors that must be fished like whales by crazy ppl) and everybody accepts the existance of ghosts around in their everyday life. I'm not sure if I could use a setting like that, I am so fucking bad at victorian stuff. I just don't get the mood. But an obsession is again growing on me: Could this setting be ported into some more familiar to me, like the A-HISTORICAL ROMAN EMPIRE? 

Check further entries.

D6 Skills: Double dipping

Depending on skill level u get 1d6 or 2d6 (take best), maybe even 3d6

TN is 5+

4 might give you partial result or not, will think about it later

the catch is that skill level double dips (or more like triple dips) because also influences a) the things you can attempt and b) the harshness of the consequences if you fail. This subleties are to be set by the GM, the monster/item description that triggers them or the module/trap design

that is all