Beta release - Part 2

Mirrored...

 

 
What a week. With the last edits as fresh as this morning, we've pulled through. Grand Heresy is happy to announce release 2 of our rolling beta. This week we cover a ton of material, going from about 15 pages to 95, putting us up to Chapter 08.

You can download your copy here

Chapter 03 Anatomy of a Bastard takes you through the structure of character creation, starting with creating your band of bastards first and establishing the overall tone and expectations for the campaign ahead.

Chapter 04  Attributes & Skills has full writeups for each, exactly as you'd expect, as well as some more specific rules on using them in play.

Chapter 05 Proficiencies & Maneuvers is what many of you have been looking forward to. It covers a character's training at arms, our proficiency system, and the maneuvers 'Bastards uses to make combat interesting. In addition, it also covers Simple Combat, allowing for less intensive combat resolution for quick scuffles or groups that are less interested in the ebb-and-flow of melee.

Chapter 06 Edges & Flaws is thus far the largest single chapter in the book, accounting for 23 pages on its own. Therein we list all of the information for the various options available to your character, and how to get the most out of your flaws in play.

Chapter 07 Story Aspects details the mechanic that really drives our game forward, covering the role it plays in allowing the player to guide the story, the reward cycle, and how SAs play into character advancement. 

Finally, Chapter 08 Supporting Cast covers how players can establish NPC relationships at character creation, or make new contacts and enemies through play.

Threads have already been set up on a chapter-by-chapter basis on our forums for feedback.

We look forward to hearing from you!

- The GH Crew

Beta Release - Part 1

Just echoing this out across the various channels...

Beta Release - Part 1

This wasn't how we intended to do it, but we figured we've kept you guys waiting long enough. Credit for the decision can actually go to some of the posters on our forums, who made an argument for a chapter-by-chapter release of the documents we have. Alright, you guys win.

This first release is going to be the intro chapter and basic mechanics. Each Thursday, we'll release another chapter or two to you guys to dissect and discuss. With the biggest chapters mostly behind us at this point, we expect the rest of the document to be finished in the next couple weeks anyway.

The download can be found here:

https://dl.orangedox.com/OzGaYpVrYIULsCFspK/BandofBastards-Beta01-Ch08.pdf

If you share the link or the document, we'd appreciate it if you used the original link, just because we want to keep track of how many people downloaded the thing as we go.

This is for you guys. Thanks for sticking with us.

- The GH Crew

The Problem With Assassination in Role Playing Games

This is mirrored from a discussion the GH forums, but I thought I'd throw it up here as well. The discussion is specific to the way Band of Bastards works, but it applies to any game with moderate-to-high potential lethality.

As I've been hammering out the rules for 'Bastards, a topic has been eating me for a while. Since Higgins and I were unable to come up with a good solution, I thought I would offer it up for discussion here.

We are going to define the word assassination in this discussion to mean "a situation in which the target is dead without a meaningful chance to prevent or react to it." The primary examples to be discussed are sniper shots and poison.

Both of these things are extremely effective in killing people. That is why they exist. It's realistic and good simulation that they should kill people pretty effortlessly when they happen, and it's fitting that the rules should encourage players to make use of them (if it is the sort of thing their character would do). After all, getting in a fair fight is usually a very poor tactic utilized by the foolish, idealistic, or desperate.

The problem is that this blade that should cut both ways, but in practice doesn't. Mechanically speaking, there's nothing stopping me as a GM from rolling some dice and announcing "Your conversation is cut short when the window shatters. Blood and brains fly out the back of your skull and splatter the wall behind you. A half-second later, your friends hear the report of a high-caliber rifle some distance away." The rules support it just like they do if it were a player character doing the same to an NPC.

The problem is that any GM who would actually do that out of the blue is ..well.. probably an asshole. For a game like 'Bastards to work, you have to have some kind of trust in your GM and killing a PC off without any meaningful chance to prevent it is a gross abuse of that trust. Poison is the same way. An option is always some kind of perception test to spot the sniper or detect the poison first, but even that seems grossly unfair when the fail-state of the test is "you die."

Thus in practice, this becomes an extremely strong tool for the PCs to use, but one that they are essentially plot-armored from ever receiving. At best, the GM is going to have to either intentionally miss the first shot, or an NPC winds up eating a bullet to alert the players to the danger.

In our discussion, Higgins did point out that we are primarily simulating fiction - not reality - and that protagonists very rarely die suddenly and without warning from assassination attempts (George R. R. Martin notwithstanding). This is a good point, but the counterpoint I offered was that the protagonists in fiction aren't aware of their own plot-armor. By contrast, players can generally trust that their GM isn't just going to kill them without a warning or a chance to prevent it - which has a strong tendency to translate into player-characters operating under the same assumption.

So the question we are forced to grapple with is "how does one balance assassination as a useful and effective tool for the PCs without making it so effective that it can never be used against them?"

Following this up with some broader-applicability to other games - I find this isn't an issue in OSR games specifically, or D&D games in general. After first the first couple levels, you generally have enough HP that a single crossbow bolt to the face isn't going to kill you, and even then in most D&D games death isn't permanent. Poisons lose a lot of their efficacy, because you can still try to make saves for them. In general, dungeon-crawling also usually means the characters are always on the lookout for something trying to kill them anyway. 

The Brute - A Class for Lamentations of the Flame Princess (or other Old School Fantasy Games)

Brutes are freaks of nature. Whether mutations born of fell magic, unspeakable parentage, or some unseemly devolution, Brutes are born cursed and misshapen. Their bodies are twisted parodies of the human form. They are huge and powerfully built, in some ways closer to ape than man. They often possess secondary characteristics that put people off - malformed or asymmetrical features, jagged teeth, unnaturally thick skin or hunched backs.

 

When a human child is born a brute, they are normally slain at birth or left in the woods to die of exposure. When a child does survive to adulthood, they are changed for the experience. Their whole lives spent fighting for survival, they are in many ways closer to animal than human. Even when calm and personable, there is something unmistakably savage and predatory about them.

Brutes can use the same Fighter-class moves as Elves and Dwarves, but do not advance in Attack. For XP, and HP, use the table below.

Level	XP	HP	Sneak Attack	Strength Mod
0	-	1d10
1	0	1d10	+1
2	2,500	1d10
3	5,000	1d10		+1
4	10,000	1d10
5	20,000	1d10	+1
6	40,000	1d10
7	80,000	1d10		+1
8	160,000	1d10
9	320,000	1d10	+1
10	480,000	3**
11	640,000	3**		+1
12	800,000	3**
13+	+160,000/lvl	3**/lvl	+1

As they advance in levels, they learn to better use their size and ferocity to their advantage. They increase their Strength Modifier and Sneak Attack when indicated on the table above. This could mean that even with only 14 Strength, a level 11 Brute could have a +4 modifier for all purposes.

House Rule: Duel Wielding

I've never liked the idea that duel-wielding gives you twice as many attacks. Having two weapons doesn't make you attack twice as quickly, and having two attacks per round is by comparison such a good option that it's almost always better than having the +1AC or whatever that a shield would have given you.

My current compromise:

When using two weapons, roll your attack as normal. If you succeed, roll the damage of each weapon. Keep the highest.

This gives a slight bonus without being ridiculously better than a two-handed weapon or shield. I'd like to incentivize using smaller weapons with this - or at least, using something like "Sword and dagger" rather than "I'm duel-wielding longswords." I'd prefer to do it without having to resort to some kind of "one weapon has to be shorter than the other" kind of rule.

Under/Over

Continuing my LotFP tinkerfest:
My biggest bugbear with the current setup is that some rolls are roll-over, others are roll-under. This bothers me, as players get confused as to which way the rolls should go.

As it stands, attack rolls and saves are roll-over. Ability rolls and skills are roll-under. I'd like to align them all in the same direction:

Option A: Roll Over

Move everything to a roll-over system. Attack rolls can stay the same (d20+AB vs AC). Saves would be the same (equal to or greater than your save number).

Ability Score would have to be roll 1d20+Ability. 21+ is success.
Skills would have to be 1d6+skill. 7 is success.

Benefits:

• Rolling high is by virtue of language and conditioning intuitively good. "Natural 20" automatically triggers something in most gamers.
• Ability Scores can be directly opposed, with each side rolling d20+Ability to determine the winner.

Drawbacks:

• Double digit+double digit math is something that will produce an "uhhhh" every time it is rolled.
• Defeats the point of recording skills in pips, as part of the charm was the visual representation on the sheet actually looking like the d6, and needing that or under.
• 21 and 7 sound arbitrary (even if they aren't), and begin to stray into TN/DC territory, which I'm not a fan of for this kind of game. The simplicity of roll-under is that what you see is what you need.
• Save numbers go down to improve instead of going up, which is slightly counter-intuitive. 

Option B: Roll Under

Attribute and Skill rolls remain as they are now. Saves are easily converted to roll-under: you just take what they are now and subtract them from 20. A sheet could have the updated saves and no one would notice the difference.

Attack Bonus would need renamed (it's no longer a bonus), but is functionally the same. If you had +2 before, it would now just be a roll-under of 2. AC would go back to TSR era "lower is better."

Your attack roll would then be a d20  with the goal of rolling under your Attack Score+EnemyAC. 

Bonuses can universally be assumed to apply to the score itself, rather than the roll, so a +1 bonus is still good.

Benefits:

• No math required anywhere except the attack roll, but that always needs math unless you want to make a chart (Note to self: consider chart). What you see is what you need.
• Pips on dice retain their charm.
• All Stats go up to improve - except for AC? Hrm.
• AC listed in other retroclones/TSR material can be used more or less as-is. 

Drawbacks:

• "Roll low to succeed" is inherently less intuitive. "Natural 1" doesn't hit the brain the same way as "Natural 20."
• Enemy AC now modifies your roll, instead of being the target you need to meet. Not sure if this is less intuitive. Could be fixed through a THAC0 style table, but that goes back into "is this more or less intuitive than the alternative? If you did go that route though, AC could be positive as well.

At present, I'm liking B more than anything, but debating whether a return to a THAC0 style chart is better or worse than weird AC mechanics.

LotFP Multiclassing/Hybrids

Last post, I was chewing on the way LotFP classes work. In the time between, I came up with the following. It needs some testing, but I like the idea:

LotFP Hybrid Classes

In addition to the four traditional classes, human characters can instead choose to play a hybrid class. Each hybrid consists of a blend of two of the core classes, gaining some of the strength of each but not the full benefits thereof.

Pick two of the following to gain your core benefits:

Cleric: Casts Cleric spells as a cleric of half their level. Cannot be combined with Magic-User.
Fighter: Gains all fighter combat options and begins with a +2 Attack Bonus, but their attack bonus never increases.
Magic-User: Casts Magic-User spells as a Magic-User of half their level. Cannot be combined with Cleric.
Specialist: Pick two skills. Each of these begin at 2 dots. One of these may increase each level.

If the character is a hybrid class that has spells, they will for all rules purposes (spells per day, learning spells, spell effects) be considered a caster of half their level. If you are a Cleric/X hybrid at level 10, you will in all ways act as though you were a level 5 cleric for the purposes of magic rules. You begin with no access to spells at level 1.

Saves will be identical to one of the parent classes. The player may choose which.

XP will be equal to the highest XP class x1.5. Thus, to get to level two a Fighter needs 3000, Cleric needs 2625, Magic-User needs 3375.

Niche protection shouldn't be an issue. Each of the core classes will always be better at their job than the hybrids. There is slightly closer competition with the demihumans but each demihuman gets a benefit that the hybrids can't and they universally have a lower xp requirement for what they are trying to do.

The applications of the above create a lot of interesting concepts. Paladins or witch-hunters could easily be fighter/clerics or even cleric/specialists.  Fighter/Specialist in particular opens up nice possibilities as a ranger or assassin. Magic-User/Specialist could even be used for a bard, god forbid.

I'll have to test this more before I decide if I like it, but it would actually handle most of the concepts I was considering making alternate classes for without deviating much from the core rules.