Skeleton
No. Encountered: Varies
Movement: 120'
Size: Man-sized
Armor Class: 7
Hit Dice: 1 (d8)
Attacks: 1
Damage: 1d6
Special Attacks:
Special Defenses: Vanity, Undead Resistances
Save: Fighter 1
Morale: 12
Treasure: TBD
Skeletons are the manifestation of vanity. They are walking
corpses stripped of skin and muscle leaving just a frame of bone, sinew, and tendons. Skeletons cling to vanity even in death, clothing themselves in the finest linens they can find and bathing themselves in scented oils. Skeletons are driven by a malevolent spirit bent on destroying beauty.
Skeletons strike upon the Vanity of all who behold them as undead; Skeletons can pass for living beings from a distance. All must roll higher than their Charisma score on a D20 or flee in terror.
All undead are immune to charms, enchantments, sleep, and hold spells.
Saturday, November 24, 2012
PDF
Friday, November 23, 2012
Turn Living
I was toying around with the concept of the undead a while back and I wanted to revisit it. Ultimately, I wanted to change the paradigm around. Rather than having the players being able to trivialize the undead with a Cleric in the party, I wanted that dynamic to work the other way.
Turn Living
Every undead creature has an innate ability to terrorize living beings and send them screaming away in horror or cower in fear. In the case of the Zombie, they exude a "fear of the grave" that requires a wisdom saving throw. So instead of every zombie encounter starting with a turn undead, it now starts with a "turn living."
As I said before, the undead should be something terrifying to characters and even a little bit for the players. With a turn living type ability and a re-imagining of their other abilities, undead encounters should be something special and a learning opportunity. We can create the opportunity for players to become undead hunters, rather than there being one in every church already.
Turn Undead
So the corresponding change would have to come upon turn undead or else a battle with the undead just becomes a battle of saving throws. Let's change turn undead to "Faith" and it allows anyone who failed their "turn living" check to reroll. Of course, this supposes that the Cleric himself succeeded in that initial save.
Now, a Cleric becomes a weapon against the undead rather than an I Win Button.
Turn Living
Every undead creature has an innate ability to terrorize living beings and send them screaming away in horror or cower in fear. In the case of the Zombie, they exude a "fear of the grave" that requires a wisdom saving throw. So instead of every zombie encounter starting with a turn undead, it now starts with a "turn living."
As I said before, the undead should be something terrifying to characters and even a little bit for the players. With a turn living type ability and a re-imagining of their other abilities, undead encounters should be something special and a learning opportunity. We can create the opportunity for players to become undead hunters, rather than there being one in every church already.
Turn Undead
So the corresponding change would have to come upon turn undead or else a battle with the undead just becomes a battle of saving throws. Let's change turn undead to "Faith" and it allows anyone who failed their "turn living" check to reroll. Of course, this supposes that the Cleric himself succeeded in that initial save.
Now, a Cleric becomes a weapon against the undead rather than an I Win Button.
Friday, August 24, 2012
The Internet Amazes Me
Ok, here is a quick post about how awesome the internet is.
Universities are putting videos, audio, and written materials from their courses online for free. It is staggering the amount of information that is publicly available. You can dabble in essentially any subject you want and pick up a pretty damn good introduction to that subject.
For example, you could listen to lectures on early modern German history. Or maybe brush up on your early modern English history. The reference material available can inform your game world in so many ways.
Why are you still buying splatbooks?
Universities are putting videos, audio, and written materials from their courses online for free. It is staggering the amount of information that is publicly available. You can dabble in essentially any subject you want and pick up a pretty damn good introduction to that subject.
For example, you could listen to lectures on early modern German history. Or maybe brush up on your early modern English history. The reference material available can inform your game world in so many ways.
Why are you still buying splatbooks?
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Bad Inspiration
Every time I get a stupid comment on this blog, it inspires me to pick it back up and write again. Then I realize that discourse online is such a joke. Well, it is a joke face to face much of the time as well, but at least civility persists when you are within arm's length of your interlocutor.
Either way, I looked over the attrition spreadsheet and realized it has a logic error. It always assumes that the high is "hot" and the low is "cold". If you were adventuring in cold climates, the low and the high could very well be below freezing, but the calculation for the high temperature would return 0 damage since it is looking for high apparent temperature. That is fixed now and the link to the right is updated; each calculation will check to see if the apparent temperature is high or low and use the correction equation.
Either way, I looked over the attrition spreadsheet and realized it has a logic error. It always assumes that the high is "hot" and the low is "cold". If you were adventuring in cold climates, the low and the high could very well be below freezing, but the calculation for the high temperature would return 0 damage since it is looking for high apparent temperature. That is fixed now and the link to the right is updated; each calculation will check to see if the apparent temperature is high or low and use the correction equation.
Monday, May 21, 2012
Attrition System Complete (For Now)
Attrition For Overland Travel
This system abstracts the rigors of travel by calculating an attrition value that is applied as hit point damage for characters traveling overland. The primary factor for determining attrition is climate data, namely, temperature, humidity, and wind speed. These numbers are used to derive a hit point value that roughly corresponds to the impact of weather on the human body (heat stress, core body temperature, etc).Climate Data
Apparent Temperature is a calculated value derived from temperature, humidity, and wind speed that is used to determine attrition. The best way to get good data is to use a historical database of weather (like this one). Use a city that your party is located near and a establish a base date from which to draw the data. For example, if my game session is May 1, 1618, I would map that date to weather data from May 1, 2010. Specifically, you will need the high and the low, average humidity, and average wind speed for the day.
Generating A Value
Use the attached spreadsheet and fill in the values that are shaded light blue. The attrition value in HP is the value highlighted in yellow. Use successive lines from the spreadsheet for successive days since attrition is cumulative.
Using The System During Play
The best way to use this sheet during play is to generate a month's worth of values. Whenever your party travels, delete all the prior days in that month and start counting forward from there. For example, if you populated the entire month of May 2010 as May 1618 and then your party traveled starting May 4th, delete the lines for the 1st through the 3rd.
The Mechanics
Attrition is calculated by using the Apparent Temperature in a correlation between temperature and mortality rate inspired by this reference. Apparent Temperature is a simplified Steadman equation. Two values are calculated, one based on the low temperature for the day and the other for the high temperature. They are then averaged as the day's attrition value.
Limitations And Common Sense
This system is only designed for creating a hit point effect for overland travel. It assumes people and draft animals are taking appropriate precautions against the weather, are fed and drinking, and traveling at a normal pace.
If these assumptions are not true, I don't change these mechanics. Rather, I increase travel time. For example, a heavy rain storm would slow the travel rate down by washing out roads, causing flash flooding, or washing out bridges or fords. So the damage calculation is the same, but the party is exposed to the elements for a longer period for time. If the party were eating only half rations, reduce their rate of travel as they can't keep a good pace up with an empty stomach. If they are under the effects of an Endure Weather spell, feel free to half the damage.
In the end, this calculation provides a realistic damage for travel; it is up to each DM to use common sense in integrating this into your game world. At least you have a strong foundation for adjudication.
The Importance of (Peer) Review
Did you look closely at the previous post's system for attrition? Did you plug in some numbers to test it out? Did you find out where the system works and fails? Did you notice how incomplete it is?
The post only details hot weather effects on attrition, what about cold weather? The heat index is only valid for temperatures above 80F and humidity above 40%, if you try to use the charts' equation for cold weather, you get nonsensical results.
What type of data we we plug in? High temperature, low temperature, average temperature? Desert travel can be brutally hot during the day and freezing cold at night, how does the above system take that into account?
So there's the direction for the next post, finding what the system is incomplete and making it more robust. Always push your design, always test the fringe cases, and always strive to make them better.
The post only details hot weather effects on attrition, what about cold weather? The heat index is only valid for temperatures above 80F and humidity above 40%, if you try to use the charts' equation for cold weather, you get nonsensical results.
What type of data we we plug in? High temperature, low temperature, average temperature? Desert travel can be brutally hot during the day and freezing cold at night, how does the above system take that into account?
So there's the direction for the next post, finding what the system is incomplete and making it more robust. Always push your design, always test the fringe cases, and always strive to make them better.
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Attrition: New Design Ethos, or, Why Your Design Has Been Found Lacking
I've been kicking around the concept of attrition for overland travel for a while now. Let's re-establish the current foundation for this system.
Attrition accumulates per day, according to a base value added to a temperature/humidity factor. The next day, the base value is the previous day's final value, which is then added to the current day's temp/humidity factor. Rinse, repeat. Here's another way of looking at it:
Attrition(0) = Base damage + Climate factor
Attrition(i) = Attrition(i-1) + Climate Factor
Now the whole concept has been simplified to a single factor, that is temperature and humidity. Those two variables, also called the heat index, should cover the vast majority of the effects of weather on the human body. Precipitation will be factored indirectly, namely, heavy rainfall washes out (or covers with snow) paths and roads, which lengthens travel time, allowing for more attrition to take place.
Now here we are at a crossroads, what numbers do we use? D&D was built on pulling numbers out of assholes in order to answer this question. This is where your design fails too, you do not have to guess at any of these numbers at all. Thanks to the information age, you can find peer-reviewed research on pretty much any topic you want. There is no reason to be building systems out of fairy tale numbers of useless heuristics you just made up.
Ok, so where do we find this information? A quick google search lands me at the Center for International Earth Science Information Network, and a handy research article called "Climate Effects On Human Health". Why, there is even a section of predictive equations! Who would have thought of this, there already IS a system for determining how your environment affects you. All we have to do is translate it into hit points and we are off to the races.
So stop pulling numbers out of your ass for your designs and put in the same amount of time into basic research.
Ok ok, back to this system. Let's see what we can use: TMR = cycle + 0.10e[0.2(F[1] - 90)] This looks extremely similar to what I want, a "temperature-specific mortality ratio" expressed as a base value added to a function of temperature. But I want heat index, or a value that combines temperature AND humidity. Thank you NOAA:
We have all of our pieces now. Stick our predictive equation into a spreadsheet along with inputs for temperature and humidity. Input the above chart into the spreadsheet and perform a look-up to pull a heat index value to stick into the predictive equation. Then, tune the factors around the exponential term in the equation as well as the output so it translates into usable hit point numbers (nothing too small or too big).
Once the sheet is set up, it takes less than 1 minute to generate an attrition value for the day's adventuring or travel. In the end, you have a system that gives you an answer as fast as you can open a spreadsheet and the answer is based on our shared reality and science.
Oh, need to find climate data for input? You have a few resources from which to work.
Attrition accumulates per day, according to a base value added to a temperature/humidity factor. The next day, the base value is the previous day's final value, which is then added to the current day's temp/humidity factor. Rinse, repeat. Here's another way of looking at it:
Attrition(0) = Base damage + Climate factor
Attrition(i) = Attrition(i-1) + Climate Factor
Now the whole concept has been simplified to a single factor, that is temperature and humidity. Those two variables, also called the heat index, should cover the vast majority of the effects of weather on the human body. Precipitation will be factored indirectly, namely, heavy rainfall washes out (or covers with snow) paths and roads, which lengthens travel time, allowing for more attrition to take place.
Now here we are at a crossroads, what numbers do we use? D&D was built on pulling numbers out of assholes in order to answer this question. This is where your design fails too, you do not have to guess at any of these numbers at all. Thanks to the information age, you can find peer-reviewed research on pretty much any topic you want. There is no reason to be building systems out of fairy tale numbers of useless heuristics you just made up.
Ok, so where do we find this information? A quick google search lands me at the Center for International Earth Science Information Network, and a handy research article called "Climate Effects On Human Health". Why, there is even a section of predictive equations! Who would have thought of this, there already IS a system for determining how your environment affects you. All we have to do is translate it into hit points and we are off to the races.
So stop pulling numbers out of your ass for your designs and put in the same amount of time into basic research.
Ok ok, back to this system. Let's see what we can use: TMR = cycle + 0.10e[0.2(F[1] - 90)] This looks extremely similar to what I want, a "temperature-specific mortality ratio" expressed as a base value added to a function of temperature. But I want heat index, or a value that combines temperature AND humidity. Thank you NOAA:
 |
| http://www.nws.noaa.gov/os/heat/heatindex.shtml |
We have all of our pieces now. Stick our predictive equation into a spreadsheet along with inputs for temperature and humidity. Input the above chart into the spreadsheet and perform a look-up to pull a heat index value to stick into the predictive equation. Then, tune the factors around the exponential term in the equation as well as the output so it translates into usable hit point numbers (nothing too small or too big).
Once the sheet is set up, it takes less than 1 minute to generate an attrition value for the day's adventuring or travel. In the end, you have a system that gives you an answer as fast as you can open a spreadsheet and the answer is based on our shared reality and science.
Oh, need to find climate data for input? You have a few resources from which to work.
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