Better Living Through Clones: Death and Dying

Continuing my journey through D&D's recent clones, looking for good rules that I can grab without needing to run them as a whole, we come to a topic that arises an awful lot in old school gaming: death.

Original D&D had death at 0 HP. Per various reports, one of the distinguishing features between Arneson and Gygax is that the former had no Raise Dead type spells in his campaign, while the latter's players always Raised a fallen comrade. Gygax's AD&D changed the tables where going to 0 (optionally as low as -3) meant you "bleed to death" until -10 HP at the rate of 1 per round. It also introduced my least favorite part of the death and dying rules, "binding wounds" as a form of emergency first aid that suddenly saves characters. It does have the wrinkle that hitting -6 will cause some kind of permanent wound.

Labyrinth Lord and BLUEHOLME kill you dead when you hit 0, no questions asked. Which is fair; it's also what the classic versions of the game they emulate do. OSRIC likewise follows AD&D with the countdown to -10.

Swords & Wizardry does the same, but there's a house rule suggested with negative HP (1 lost per round) up to character level, which doesn't really help low-level characters much but could save a higher-level one who ran into bad luck.

Lamentations of the Flame Princess tinkers with the AD&D system. 0 HP does not cause death, but unconsciousness; -3 is a mortal wound and causes death in 1d10 minutes. Instant death is at -4 hit points. It's not quite clear if there are any bleeding out processes going on; I actually don't think there are, but I'd be willing to be corrected.

Basic Fantasy RPG says that 0 HP is death but presents a couple of optional rules: enabling Raise Dead spells, allowing save vs. Death Ray to survive for 2d10 rounds, or the traditional AD&D "you don't actually die until -10 HP" rule. It offers a variation where the maximum negative HP equals the PC's Constitution score.

Adventurer Conqueror King System has an elaborate "mortal wounds" table that, based on a d20 roll (modified by a variety of factors) and a d6 roll, determines exactly what kind of wound you sustained. This offers a good variety of results that aren't instant death, and gives some potential dismemberment or disfiguration as a result of brushes with death.

While it says it's not a clone (and technically really isn't), Dungeon Crawl Classics does have two mechanics for 0 HP not quite killing a character. One is that on the round a character hits 0 HP or the round after it, the PC can be healed. The other is the "recovering the body" check where it turns out via a Luck roll that the PC isn't quite dead. So that's two last chances. (As long as you're not a 0 level schmuck in a funnel. In that case, you're just dead.)

None of these match what I currently do: I roll 1d6, subtract any negative hit points the character takes, and the result is the number of rounds it takes for the character to bleed out. If this total is 0 or less, it means that instant death has occurred. Magical healing is possible during this window.

The option that is most tempting to me is the ACKS table. It's certainly the most inventive of the lot, and offers a lot of great gory possibilities. The problem is that the rules for how it applies are a bit complicated; I'd be tempted just to roll on it with 1d20 + Con bonus - negative HP. The ACKS way of figuring exactly what percentage of HP you are below 0 is just too fiddly for me. My own house rule is not far from either LotFP or DCC, and I like elements of both. It really requires some more thought as to which is most stealable.

Better Living Through Clones: The Cost of Armor

As other people are talking about the new edition of D&D, I want to start taking a look at the way that different classic clones handle things. Generally it will focus on finding things that are tweaked by the clones in ways I like. I'm starting with the cost of armor.

In original Dungeons & Dragons, leather armor costs 15 GP, chain costs 30 GP, and plate costs 50. Given that PCs rolled 3d6x10 for starting gold, it was a given that most fighters would be able to afford plate armor. (It's not plate mail. That's a mistake of 19th century writers that Gary propagated into the 20th and 21st. Mail is chain armor.) After an adventure any PC should be getting it. Encumbrance is really the only reason to use chain or leather.

Holmes kept the OD&D prices, while Moldvay moved it up a bump: leather is 20, chain 40, and plate 60. Mentzer and the Rules Cyclopedia keep this distribution. AD&D adds a whole bunch of armor types, many of them mythical or silly (such as studded leather and ring mail). Leather is only 5 GP, while chain goes up to 75 and plate to 400 GP. This meant that most fighters started with such ahistorical armor such as studded leather or ring mail, or if they rolled well they could afford scale armor or mail.

(And yes, I'm being pedantic, but there is no evidence that ring armor was actually used; it's mostly a misinterpretation of medieval depictions of mail, or chain armor, which is not called "chain mail" because that's redundant. And putting metal studs in a leather coat is a fashion choice, and would have no defensive value.)

What's fascinating is that clones tend to lean toward AD&D's side of the armor prices, even if they don't have all of the variations, but not in any standard way. Basic Fantasy uses 20 for leather, 60 for chain and 300 for plate. Labyrinth Lord is 20/150/600, and adds in several AD&D types to fill the gaps. LotFP uses silver, but charges 25 for leather, 100 for chain, and 1000 for plate. Swords & Wizardry uses 5 for leather, 75 for chain and 100 for plate, adding in the mythical ring armor for 30 GP. BLUEHOLME uses what are in its case the Holmes prices: 15/30/50, and Adventurer Conqueror King follows Moldvay with 20/40/60.

For most of these, the result is that starting fighters will wear chain and carry a shield (generally equivalent to AC 4). But Dexterity can improve AC, in most of these up to AC 1 – a step better than OD&D even allows – and with AD&D style bonuses, even AC 0. OD&D and Holmes conversely have AC 2 fighters and clerics wearing plate armor unless they're really poor, or really need to be sneaky.

After a lot of experience, I find myself in favor of the higher prices. PCs start with 3d6x10 GP or some number around that in most of these versions of the rules; I know Labyrinth Lord goes higher with 3d8x10, one of its many quirky switches that is there to avoid actually being a photocopy of Moldvay and Cook/Marsh. Despite the cheap cost in B/X, as a sop to at least minimal realism I require six weeks for the manufacture of a suit of plate armor; it was a difficult and time-consuming process that involved fitting the plates precisely to a cast model of the eventual wearer. (So don't gain weight!) Actual medieval armorers could take months fitting plate armor together, but if your life depends on it, aren't you going to want it as well made as humanly possible?

OD&D implies that it takes an armorer (100 GP / month) a month to make a suit of armor, or two with assistants, yet the armor only retails for 50 GP; maybe it's a loss leader? If we extrapolate from this, the Basic Fantasy prices are actually pretty on the money, while Labyrinth Lord's are a bit inflated. Generally I find this setup preferable, because it focuses on core armor types and doesn't add in a bunch of fake ones that Gary Gygax pulled from inaccurate 19th century sources.

Dexterity makes it possible for a mail-wearing 1st level fighter in BFRPG to be as survivable as his plate-wearing OD&D cousin. BFRPG also exaggerates the weight of armor a bit less than OD&D does, which is another point in favor of its equipment list. I'm sure there were Renaissance suits of ceremonial plate armor that weighed around 75 lbs (as in OD&D), but a well made suit shouldn't really be much over 50 lbs (the weight in BFRPG). This, of course, does make enforcing encumbrance rules important, but that was always supposed to be a mitigating factor of different armor types.

OK, so it's a little wet ...

The galerias romanas (Roman galleries) in Lisbon, Portugal are one of the harder architectural marvels to get into. A crack in one of the galerias means that the underground ruins are accumulating groundwater, and most of the year, they are flooded. Every year, the ruins are painstakingly drained (the process takes a full month) and visitors are allowed to enter for about 3 days. The rest of the year, the water is allowed to stay, at about 3m depth (10').

Which is a fun way to transition to talking about water in dungeons. Homeowners know all about the tendencies of underground spaces to accumulate water; we've invented sump pumps, French drains and all sorts of systems to reverse this tendency. But in dungeons it's a fascinating obstacle that I've thought about for a while now.

The first thing you have to decide about water is whether it is flowing or stagnant. If it is flowing underground, there must be some source: a river, spring or aquifer that is feeding the body, and a corresponding outlet. If there were no outlet, the body of water would continuously rise. (This is certainly a possibility: an extremely slow rising body of water, fed at a rate of well less than half an inch per year.)

Stagnant water has been deposited by some source and is not continuously refreshed. This is extremely dangerous to humans, since stagnant water is a breeding ground for disease and bacteria. Contact with a pool of such water should require some kind of appropriate disease checks; suitable rules exist in Blackmoor, the Dungeon Master's Guide and Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Drinking it is even more dangerous.

After that the next decision is depth. Water becomes a different type of obstacle depending on the depth. A foot deep permits more motion than two; three might be navigable for humans but is swimming territory for halflings. Deeper than that becomes a serious problem, if not totally impossible to cross. Water, of course, ruins most of the things adventurers carry; waterlogged boots can get mildew or mold, and generally become useless, while soaked torches or spellbooks are useless. Swords and armor will rust if not properly cared for. And swimming while in armor is basically impossible. Watch the video if you don't believe me – heck, even if you do believe me, it's a great experimental video.

Other factors can also be interesting: temperature, current, or brackishness. For instance, clear, cool water is very different from hot mineral spring water. In a dungeon near the sea, some water may be salty and undrinkable. And it could be very dangerous if the water has a strong current, pulling adventurers along with it as they try to navigate it. Varying any of these can create unique environments and pose certain challenges.

Now that we've put water into the dungeon, comes the payoff: all the water monsters in D&D are fair game. From sharks to sahuagin, from ixitxachitl to aboleths, and any kind of new monsters based on fish or whales or anything else you like, you've now got a reason to use these in dungeons. A long-standing version might have a blind cave version of the classic lake monster archetype, or vicious schools of piranha, or pretty much any cave swimmers you might imagine. It's a rich environment for monsters that aren't typical. And let's not forget about amphibians, arthropods and the like.

Of course where there are monsters, there is also treasure. This can be a bit tough to figure out. In chemically pure water, basically, copper, silver and gold should be relatively unaffected by corrosion. (In fact, copper coins in fresh water should tend to reduce the bacterial load.) The problem is that water is not pure and contains other minerals and compounds that will interact with metal. It could also complicate things if the coins are not pure metal. Seawater will corrode copper and silver coins, but leave gold fairly intact. Only acidity, introduced by the breakdown of wood or the general condition of sandy soil, would pose much of a danger to gold coins. The most dangerous thing would be an untreated wooden chest containing them.

Most gems will not be water soluble and should survive pretty well in tact. But iron is toast even if it gets minor exposure, as are most books or scrolls (leather parchment will be ruined and the ink will dissolve), and pretty much any wooden objects that aren't covered with tar, pitch or some other sealant. Magic items are the referee's call; it would be interesting to find a shining steel blade in a rotting leather scabbard and with a ruined handle, but the blade and tang in tact. Potions may or may not leak, which could have very interesting results – say, a wizard's laboratory where several potions have mixed together to form ... well, pretty much anything you want.

Water complicates everything very nicely. Spells will be interesting, from Sleep (does it turn into an effective Drown?) to Lightning Bolt and others. A Fireball might boil some of it. And of course there are many interesting spells and items that only work under water.

Given all these possibilities, it's a disappointment that there aren't more modules and books dealing with flooded environments. It's definitely something I keep intending to explore. I hope this inspires other referees to do the same.

On the Starting Player Character

I recently got into a discussion of Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar stories, and particularly where to start when reading them, on Google+. The apparently natural place to start is the first volume, which depending upon which release you are reading, will be Swords and Deviltry or Ill Met in Lankhmar – either way, with "The Snow Women," "The Unholy Grail" and "Ill Met in Lankhmar." Unfortunately, that's a terrible way to read the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories. You're well over 100 pages in before you actually get to Fafhrd and the Mouser interacting. It puts me in mind of modern Hollywood, which is obsessed with telling and re-telling "origin stories" because they follow a predictable pattern. It's a really bad one with Leiber's characters, who are at their best once they've actually gotten together. Reading the Lankhmar books in order denies you the good parts for most of the first book.

It happens that I started reading Leiber with the 1996 release of Lean Times in Lankhmar, and more or less began with the titular story. I wanted to read their origin stories because I knew who they would become. And of course, Leiber didn't start with "The Snow Women" or "The Unholy Grail" or even "Ill Met," but rather "Jewels in the Forest," set after Swords and Deviltry.

A starting OD&D fighting-man has the level title of "Veteran." I like that; it implies that he or she has been through a war and survived. They are not farmboys, and have some training and idea of what they're doing. (Dungeon Crawl Classics changes this, which I think is odd.) But given the way the game is set up, we don't know if they are going to survive.

What I've found through play is that pre-written background doesn't mean anything. This is because of a principle that writers are expected to bear in mind: the story you are telling should be the most exciting and important thing that has ever happened to the character. A background made up for a PC before the start of play is, of necessity, not that interesting; after all, they never got any experience points for it.

This is why fan fiction and prequels tend to be markedly inferior. If the earlier story was the most exciting thing that happened to the character, things that happened before tend to be less exciting by definition. Even characters with serial adventures tend to have a best episode or two, compared with which everything else is simply lesser work.

Interesting player characters in my games have always been the ones that emerge in the midst of play. No amount of background has ever really fixed that. Improvisational roleplaying creates character traits that were often totally unexpected. You can't bake that into the character by writing a story of what happened to them beforehand. The best examples I've seen tend to be people who start from very broad strokes and only become more specific in the heat of the game.

Really, I think this is a big part of why D&D's class system has been so enduringly popular: it gives players a good basis to create adventurers from whole cloth, and then let them gain more definition as the game goes on. Maybe a background story will be appropriate when they hit 4th level and become a "Hero" – just as I only appreciated the origins of Fafhrd and the Mouser once I'd read their adventures in Stardock and Quarmall. But at the start, I really find they're not needed, and only distract from defining the character in play.

The Other Free Basic Rules

A lot of people are going to get a set of free basic rules today. I want to encourage people to check out Basic Fantasy RPG, which is a totally open-source project and is completely, 100% free. BFRPG has been free since 2006, and is a clone of B/X without race-as-class.

There are a lot of clones that have come after BFRPG, including the more B/X-like Labyrinth Lord, but I've always liked BF's straightforward split of race from class. It does a good job with the straightforward nature of ascending AC, and breaks up characters into narrower bands for gaining to-hit bonuses, which makes everyone slightly better at fighting. But it doesn't get into the comically high armor classes of 3.x. And if it gets rid of 1 XP per gold piece of treasure as a rule, it's listed as an optional rule and is easy to restore.

What was important about Basic Fantasy when it first appeared in 2006 was simple: here was a game that declared, with capital letters, "This is OLD SCHOOL." That was awesome. It was a shot across the bow: this was saying that the old school play that had been dismissed in favor of the new "latest and greatest" was a valid way to play the game. And in 2006 it was considered more or less acceptable to dismiss and ridicule the way that people had played D&D in the '70s and '80s as being primitive and/or foolish.

Basic Fantasy has had great community support, and J.D. Neal's modules are excellent takes on the standards created by B2 and X1. There are supplements to add whatever you like to BFRPG, and plenty of free resources from the community. The second bold move on the BFRPG cover was to put a disclaimer: "Don't Buy This Book!" By making BF totally free, Chris Gonnerman created an atmosphere where the game's fans have given generously and openly. I think that's an awesome thing for him to have done.

A third thing was accomplished by BFRPG that isn't usually recognized: it was the most compact single-volume version of the game when it came out. Basic Fantasy is only 154 pages when you include the index and Open Game License. That's quite an accomplishment. Labyrinth Lord is about 19 pages shorter, but that's still no mean feat. Both are also in more readable fonts than the Basic and Expert rulebooks, hence the longer page counts.

If you wanted to run a basic game tomorrow, Basic Fantasy has all the tools you could want. If you already know the rules, it's also worth checking out the adventures and supplemental material. I particularly like The Chaotic Caves, a B2-style module that would be fun for people who've played the original Keep too often and know all its secrets.

Ready Reference: What Kind of Mushroom Is It?

There aren't a lot of plants that grow naturally in caves and underground locales. This is generally because plants, as a rule, require light. But where there are moisture and food (which may include fecal matter), it is possible for fungi of various sorts to grow. (Conveniently for hexcrawlers, they grow in forests as well.) Mushrooms are great and interesting things, and can have all kinds of effects when introduced into the human body. This chart is for when PCs find mushrooms, and maybe do something about it.

(For the curious, the mushroom on the left is the death cap, the most toxic mushroom for humans; the one on the right is the fly agaric, which causes hallucinations.)

d100		Description
01-30		Harmless but inedible. The mushroom is too tough to eat or indigestible, but trying it will not make a human sick.
31-35		Bioluminescent. These mushrooms are neither edible nor poisonous, but they give off light. It only illuminates 2' from the mushroom but they will be visible from as far away as 120' if there is a clear line of sight.
36-55		Edible but not incredible. This type of fungus has nutritional value, and eating enough will give some basic semblance of nutrition, but it tastes bland and spongy. They can be gathered and sold for 1 GP per pound.
56-59		Delicious. Not only edible, but tastes very good, cooked or not. In town these can be worth up to 10 GP per pound of mushrooms.
60		Rare gourmet mushrooms. These are the finest mushrooms, or perhaps truffles. They are extremely rare and nobles or merchants will easily pay 100 GP per pound.
61-75		Mildly poisonous. These mushrooms cause retching and vomiting; a character failing a saving throw will be disabled for 2d6 turns while they deal with the effects.
76-80		Extremely poisonous. A character who eats these and fails a saving throw versus poison will die. Success entails 2d6 turns of retching and vomiting.
81-90		Psychoactive. A saving throw against poison should be made; the result determines how much control the character eating the mushroom has. They will experience hallucinations, visions, perhaps even synesthesia, but if they make a saving throw they can act normally through the experience. Failure means the character is inactive for 2d6 turns. Each mushroom can sell for 10-20 GP in town.
91-00		Magic mushroom. The mushroom is literally magical. Suggested effects include growth up to 50%, shrinking up to 50%, healing 1-3 hit points per mushroom eaten, invisibility, bioluminescence, growing mushrooms, polymorphing into a random animal, or reversing any of these effects.

Magic and the Sense of Wonder

A linkbait list from io9 recently listed the "20 Most WTF Magical Items in Dungeons & Dragons." It's pretty typical of the genre; you can find it here. But it happened to have an excerpt that I found intriguing.

The Wand of Wonder — as in, the Wand of Wondering What The Luntic That Made This Thing Was Thinking Of. When used, it performs one of 20 completely random functions, which can include 1) a powerful gust of wind, 2) 600 butterflies appearing out of nowhere, 3) shrinking the wand holder, and 4) making leaves grow on the target for some reason. Say you were a soldier. Would you bring a gun that would randomly fire bullets, water, or 600 freaking butterflies into battle? Exactly.

I didn't like the article, but this helped me put my finger on something that has long bothered me generally in D&D about magic, namely that, overall, it's very utilitarian and not often sufficiently wonderful. A magic wand, by my lights, shouldn't be as reliable as a gun.

The one area where D&D really nails this is the magic sword. OD&D magical swords are all unique, with personalities and special abilities, and offer a rich experience for the fighters who use them. This is done with some fairly simple charts, and worked into the alignment system pretty seamlessly. The artifact system in Eldritch Wizardry is also good at this, and creates unique items, but these are top-flight, one in a campaign type items. Magic swords, meanwhile, are things that might exist in fairly normal campaigns below the highest levels without blowing things out of proportion.

Spells, meanwhile, tend to be quite mundane and utilitarian, almost to the point where they are simply a given in the rules. And this is to the detriment of the sense of wonder that the game wants to create. So, I've been thinking about ways to rectify this. I think the magic sword approach, expanded somewhat, is perhaps the best way to enhance the spell list, by giving each copy of a spell some "personality."

The first thing I thought of with relation to this is psychedelia. The picture above by Tim Callahan shows a hallucinating wizard, and is one thing I've long felt was missing. Psychedelic experiences of various sorts have long been a part of magical rituals, particularly using naturally-occurring hallucinogens such as "magic mushrooms." This is a good way to give a spell some really interesting material components; maybe an ESP or similar type of spell requires the caster to use some hallucinogen; the working out of the spell is simply an extension of the hallucination. Or maybe othe spells require an altered state of mind in order to cast them at all. Of course, this always carries the danger of a "bad trip."

But magic-users can't be tripping all of the time. Some spells, particularly non-combat spells, can be made up into rituals that take a while to perform. This is hinted at with the magic circle of Protection from Evil as written; it's a solid way to add thematic requirements to spell-casting and make the magic-user more interesting, particularly if there is some chance of the character botching the ritual to cast the spell. Divination spells combine well with rituals of traditional real-world divination, such as casting bones to come up with a result.

Another fairly obvious spin is alchemical. Dave Arneson's concept, which I've discussed before, of spellcasters needing to prepare a spell in advance smacks of their being alchemical in nature. This can work well with even our more combat-oriented spells such as Sleep or Fireball coming out of some mixture of powerful alchemical components. A Sleep spell effectuated in this way might take the form of a sleeping gas, for instance. It also allows the possibility that spells have been pre-cast and sat for centuries; perhaps the magic has gone a bit awry in that time.

There are dozens of types of practice that you can mingle with the existing spells of D&D. For instance, some types of magic are purely verbal and rely upon magic words or true names. Others could use sympathetic magic, using a bit of hair or a fetish to cast a spell like Charm Person that feels very much like a lot of love spells.

What I think is key is coming up with a way that each spell learned is somehow different from any other spell. These methods can be combined in various interesting ways. One magic-user's spellbook may have a recipe for an alchemical Sleep spell while another's contains a formula that commands sleep, and a third may be an elaborate hypnotism-like ritual. Once this is determined, the spell is now something quite different, not just a powerful thing that the magic-user does but something very special all on its own.

It's a bit of a wrinkle, but I think it's something I want to craft some house rules around. I'm curious how it would work out in practice.