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Welcome to the Elf Lair Games discussion forums--A New Class of Old School! Discuss, kibitz, and enjoy, but always obey the Golden Rule: Be Excellent to One Another.
Re: Chainmail Combat with OD&D « Result #1 on Nov 29, 2009, 8:15pm »
Hi Jason: Thanks for your response. I figured it was the grad-school thing, which I'd seen you announce on the Elf's Lair blog or some such place. On reflection, flurry/exchanges seem like a can of worms. As to other things that might "slow down combat," a couple of things give me a perhaps eccentric perspective on the matter:
1. I have a small-group bias. I generally like play-groups of 3-5, including any GM. This means, first, adapting the system so that small pairs or trios make a functional PC band, and second, with fewer participants there's more play in the resolution times.
2. Seems to me you can structure a combat system in a few ways:
* each round/turn has a lot going on but there are usually few of them (i.e. fights are over quickly); * each round/turn has a lot going on AND it takes a lot of rounds to resolve a combat (fights take a LONG time); * each round/turn has relatively little going on but it takes a lot of rounds to resolve a combat; * each round/turn has relatively little going on and in very few of them you have an outcome.
I'm more open to the first of those than the middle two.
3. And yet, I don't want to get all Rolemaster about things either.
On to a couple of the items.
3. Yeah, your Age of Conan pdf is the bomb.
4. If I were to use the "damage save" approach to hit points, they would sort of be a "save versus death" thing - death or incapacitation/out of the fight anyway. So there might not even be *points* of damage to suffer.
5. Worthy idea. I do think "drive back" only appears in the mass rules? So it would take some adapting beyond what you've got in Supplement 0.
6. I'm more or less down with not wanting to dictate PC behavior. I wonder about using a failed morale check as a thumb on the scales, though. Such as, if a PC fails a morale check, he can stay in the fight, but the degree by which he failed becomes a to-hit penalty. A cool thing about both your Chainmail pdf and Spellcraft and Swordplay is that PC morale-check failures can be partial too - e.g. fight as 2 men instead of 3, or one man instead of 4 etc, depending on how badly you fail.
Jason Vey, President Elf Lair Games Web: http://www.grey-elf.com e-mail: elflair (at) grey-elf (dot) com "I will say this just once: GARY NEVER USED MINIATURES!!!" --Old Geezer, RPG.net
Re: Chainmail Combat with OD&D « Result #3 on Nov 18, 2009, 11:12am »
Hi, Jim,
Sorry it took so long to respond to your message. Elf Lair has been on a bit of a hiatus due to me being in graduate school. But you bring up some good points here. I'll address them in order.
1. This could work, but would slow down combat quite a bit.
2. The removal of polyhedrals is nothing more than my personal preference. Indeed, D&D seems to demand percentiles at least on its face.
3. Good point; this is why, in my Age of Conan game, I use the Chainmail magic system instead of D&D's Vancian magic. This allows wizards to cast with impunity.
4. Intriguing idea. It adds an extra die roll to the mix every hit, which would slow down combat, but I'd suggest that (if you use this) you compare your hit dice to their damage roll, and you only suffer the difference, should their damage be higher. If your hit die roll is higher, you suffer no damage.
5. I'd say simply use "drive back" exactly as it appears in Chainmail. Just drop it in.
6. Tough call; I've never been a fan of morale for PCs. I don't like rules that effectively tell the players how to play their characters (the odd fear check on a spell aside). For NPCs and monsters I can see it playing a bigger roll.
Jason Vey, President Elf Lair Games Web: http://www.grey-elf.com e-mail: elflair (at) grey-elf (dot) com "I will say this just once: GARY NEVER USED MINIATURES!!!" --Old Geezer, RPG.net
Re: Chainmail Combat with OD&D « Result #4 on Nov 9, 2009, 9:31pm »
Hi James: I'm a new board member, and hope that reviving old threads is not, in context, a terrible sin. I was excited to discover S&S and this board and particularly this thread because, hey, it fits my preoccupations!
I'm not an "old-school gamer" as such. I did start playing 3LBB-plus-Greyhawk back in January 1979, but these days I'm happy to play everything from Dogs in the Vinyard to Hollow Earth Expedition. Nevertheless, back a year or so ago when it was possible I picked up the PDFs of white-box, Greyhawk and Chainmail, with special interest in how Chainmail fit into the whole picture. (We indeed pretty much immediately started using the "alternate system" as modified by Greyhawk.) And OMG, discovered that standard Chainmail combat is a die-pool system (TN 6!) with mook rules. Not only that, but it has the ancestor of the Minion rules from Spirit of the Century in it: IIRC in a mass combat, a Hero/Superhero attached to a base of troops takes no damage until all the troops he's attached to are wiped out. (I think a Hero also doesn't die unless he takes four kill results (6s) in one roll.
That was kind of mind-blowing.
Then, the way you explain the other subsystems tends to mitigate complaints a lot of people have with D&D as it evolved. Frex, ablative HP are less of an issue if higher-level combatants are also dealing multiple dice of damage. And when one considers that the M2M and MvM tables were "one roll engines," the old "AC makes you harder to 'hit'" bugaboo makes more sense. Since it originally wasn't a roll "to hit" at all, but a roll to kill, it's just a reasonable level of abstraction for fast-play combat resolution. To me, if you're going to add damage rolls to that, it makes more sense that damage by weapon be uniform - rolling enough to get past the armor on the M2M table means you've already determined that this blow is a potentially deadly strike.
You've laid it out nicely, and I'm particularly intrigued by the deadliness of the standard missile rules. Something that comes up in fantasy system discussions all the time is that when Conan is stopped in the street by some guardsman with crossbows, he bloody well freezes for them, because he's afraid a couple of crossbow bolts might kill him. Chainmail as you explicate it here fits with that kind of thing.
Also, if I read you right, higher-level fighters on the M2M table take multiple actions per round, so if you have two higher-level fighters going at it together, it would be like a flurry of attacks, right, before a new round begins?
Now, couple thoughts:
1) How about interleaving attacks on the M2M table during a flurry. e.g.A won intiative so A goes then B then A then B until each has used up all their attacks for the round?
2) The polyhedrals. They're not part of the "non-alternate" combat system, but they seem to be the "official" way to do some other things. One could, well, use them for those things.
3) Alas, deliberately nerfing low-level magic-users seems to have been core to the game from the very beginning. And when you've got fighters throwing multiple handfuls of dice for damage and making several attacks per round even at relatively low levels, the disparity in viability is that much greater.
4) Hit dice: Here's a crazy optional idea - don't roll & record static hit points. Roll them as a "damage save" every time you get hit. If you're a first level fighter with "1+1 hit dice" you have 1+1 hit dice. If someone beats your AC on the M2M or MvM table, they roll damage and you roll your hit dice and compare the scores. Then . . . well, I haven't worked that part out yet.
5) What's a good way to reintegrate "driven back" or some result beyond "you're dead" or "you take X damage" into a Chainmail-based system? Maybe a defender can always trade space for damage if she has room behind her and is willing? (If you're trying to defend other party members maybe you have to suck it up. If there's a wall at your back, oh well! If there's a chasm at your back, how can the attacker choose "driven back.")
6) Is it anyone else's sense that morale checks should be a much bigger part of combat than they became by the time we all standardized on some interpretation of AD&D? If so, what to do about morale checks for PCs? Never? PCs can ignore at a cost in effectiveness?
Re: S&S for Dark Sun « Result #5 on Oct 29, 2009, 8:19pm »
An update or two: having pretty well twisted up the setting to fit my vision, I ended up changing it from Dark Sun to something of my own, though obviously quite inspired by Dark Sun. I just posted the playtest version at my website, The Wheel of Samsara.
Also, I'm going to be running a PbP playtest over at rpg.net. if anyone wants in, let me know by posting there or PMing me.
I have the PDF of S&W White Box and its very close from the original, while not really being the original. It's hard to put into words.
Well, as the guy who created S&W WhiteBox, I hope you like the overall effect. I was actually trying to capture the spirit of the rules as much or more than the actual letter of the rules. My thought is that gaming had evolved somewhat over 30 years and a rules set should take advantage of this, while trying to remain pretty close to the actual rules at the same time. The second printing will make a few changes that folks really asked for, such as making some of the spell names closer to the original ones.
"The worthy GM never purposely kills players' PCs, He presents opportunities for the rash and unthinking players to do that all on their own." - Gary Gygax
"Don't ask me what you need to hit. Just roll the die and I will let you know!" - Dave Arneson
Jason Vey, President Elf Lair Games Web: http://www.grey-elf.com e-mail: elflair (at) grey-elf (dot) com "I will say this just once: GARY NEVER USED MINIATURES!!!" --Old Geezer, RPG.net
Joined: Aug 2008 Gender: Male Posts: 17 Location: Tasmania, Australia Karma: 0
Re: Anyone pick up OSRIC? « Result #9 on Oct 8, 2009, 4:16pm »
Benoist, since I wrote my above long post back in July, I've read enough now to know that OSRIC has done a good job being a 1e clone (which doesn't change my bewilderment at its lack of promotion). However, I stand by my opinion of S&W (both Core and WB). Some of the differences between the latter clone and the original seem totally unnecessary given the freedom of the OGL. It's a shame, I would've like to have seen the LBB's cloned in much the same way that LL cloned Moldvay. Owning both the originals and copies of S&W, the latter to me feels like a totally different game, although admittedly, given the nature of clones and the ability to take a Word document of the rules and alter them to in any way I see fit, there is nothing to stop me producing a nice, neat, doctored, single-volume copy of the "original" rules (another project of my rather long list of things to do "one day").
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