Temple of the Night Serpent
Monday, August 3rd, 2020
My first map for public consumption drawn by hand using my own map assets. This was meant to be the centerpiece of a battle against yuan-ti cultists, but COVID has delayed my group’s ability to meet. Rather than allow it to languish unused, I’m sharing it.
Positions, Puzzle Boxes, Adversaries and More
Friday, June 26th, 2020
One of my BitD groups recently had a discussion about play styles due to some questions involving how one goes about negotiating for Position and Effect. One of the players, frustrated by the system, wanted to know what the normal difficulty of an action should be. The thing is, in BitD, there’s no real answer to that question.
Completely Exhausted!
Wednesday, February 26th, 2020
Apparently there is this mechanic in 5e called “exhaustion” that takes effect when…reasons. I don’t really know beyond “falling unconscious” triggers the effect. I’m only aware of the mechanic because I read a play report regarding a desert chase scene an adventuring group undertook while in bad, bad shape, which exhaustion only made worse (slower movement, inability to spend or regain HD, etc). The idea intrigued me, as it seemed to add a level of tension to play that simple hit point loss does not.
My understanding is that there are levels of exhaustion, from one to five. The first level of exhaustion doesn’t seem to have a huge effect, but level five means you can’t move, defend yourself, cast spells, use HD, or regain hp, or pretty much act in any way until you bring down your exhaustion level with a full night of rest (healing spells don’t help).
My inclination is not to add this as a constant mechanic to the game, but to add it as a sparingly utilized mechanic for tense, long-term situations — wilderness treks, pursuits, moving through extreme environments, failure to take regular long rests, severe injury and unconsciousness, and so on — and to have only three levels of exhaustion, from “tired, but fully capable” to “halved movement, penalty to all actions” to “completely incapable”.[1]
Adventure Design in Short
Friday, February 14th, 2020
One of the methods I use to design and run adventures is by using organic situational development based on a pre-existing bare-bones infrastructure, fleshed out in play by both player character actions and by the addition of customized random event lists. Which totally sounds like some kind of crazy corporate jargon — localized variegated synergyzms?
But here is what that actually means and how one would, themselves, go about doing so.
The short version, anyways.
DC Without a Tire Fire
Wednesday, December 11th, 2019
In our D&D hack, there are no specific skills, no skill points to distribute, and so on. To attempt to use “skills”, players instead roll Attribute checks based on the most logical Attribute involved in what their character is attempting, and receive a bonus to that roll if their Profession or Background applies and/or if they have the appropriate tools or toolkit for the job.
In most games, the success of such skill checks is based on a sliding scale of difficulty–represented by a difficulty class (DC)–that attempts to account for all sorts of various calculated factors. I’ve found setting the difficulty for skill checks in this way, and doing so with consistent fairness, can sometimes be challenging and can simply bog-down play. This was something I felt needed to be simplified, and as such ruled that any difficult task a character attempts requires the a player’s modified roll to reach or exceed a result of 12. So when a player asks what they need to roll when attempting a skill-related task, the response is easy: 12. To the point they no longer need to ask: they already know what succeeds.