Obligatory Still Alive Post

Yea, still alive. It's the usual song and dance, too much going on personally and professionally to keep the blog going at a good pace since the New Year. Hopefully it gets better soon.

A few things in the (mental) pipeline:

• Flesh out a mechanic describing charges as an attack on morale.
• Tweak the firearms a little, addressing a few concerns and expanding how they interact with other D&D staples like magic.
• Start developing some expansions to the combat system, namely a uinified mechanic to resolve special attacks (like disarms or trips) and adding some characteristics to weapons (like the Armor Penetration mentioned for firearms).
• Expand the non-weapon proficiencies from standard AD&D/LL, adding concrete effects and expanding the selections available.
• Go back and clean up the race posts and start going through the rule book section by section again.

Pike and Cavalry in D&D Combat

Delta has a good post on a "Close Combat Trinity," explaining the relationship between swordsman, cavalry, and pikemen as "Historically: Swords best Pikes best Cavalry best Swords." In applying this to D&D, he notes that swordsman are well represented by typical D&D combat, but pikemen and cavalry are not. In particular, he notes "cavalry attack is intrinsic to the unit's own movement" and "pike attack is intrinsic to the unit's enemy's movement." This is not modeled in D&D combat where movement and attacks are modeled as distinct actions or fall into abstraction if you go by the 60 second combat round. Yet, this is a great disservice to the actual mechanics behind these two weapons and how they influenced warfare.

You Can't Go Home Again, or, Designing For Players

I spent the last two weeks visiting family and friends up north and it got me thinking about designing explicitly for an expected or actual player(s). Should a DM design world and rule settings that cater to a specific play style or type of player?

Firearm Mechanics And Statistics

Let's build some mechanics around the previous post.

Firearms

Yes, this EMP campaign will include firearms; it's the 17th century after all. They will be available for PCs and NPCs alike, with no vague prohibitions. Anyone who can afford one, can be trained in its use, and take care of a firearm can employ them as they see fit. I don't see any problem with having this piece of technology (or any time appropriate technology) enter into a fantasy game.

What follows is descriptions of firearms as they were known in 1618, consolidated so as to be usable for gaming without the minutiae. We'll get into mechanics in a follow up post.

Elven Game Lore

I've established Elves in the EMP campaign as a mostly nomadic people. If we take a lesson from Farm, Forge, and Steam to heart, we learn that "population dense agriculture trump[s] population diffuse nomadism (hunter-gatherer/herding). Always." So we create a little contradiction here, how have Elves remained a nomadic people through antiquity to the early modern period while sharing the continent with humans?

Farm, Forge, and Steam

I've been doing many posts on rules building lately, but that can get rather dry especially from the spectator's point of view. So let's go back to world building.