"Exploding" Damage Rolls?

Inspired by fairly recent posts on this topic by my friend Carl and by Al at Beyond the Black Gate, I am really seriously pondering the use of an "exploding" damage system for my current Arandish Labyrinth Lord campaign.

Carl's version of the house rule -- which he calls "Let it Ride" or "Double or Nothing" and which differs from the usual "exploding" damage procedure as I've seen it iterated elsewhere -- goes like this:

Whenever a successful melee or ranged attack is made, the attacker can choose to let it ride - this involves throwing a second attack roll.  If this is also successful, the attack does double normal damage, but if it fails, the attack does no damage at all. This can be attempted a third time if the second roll is successful, for quadruple damage with a success but again, no damage at all with a failure.

I like the vibe of this but am not inclined to require additional attack rolls; rather, I would like to hinge the mechanic upon the damage dice rolled.  Al proposes using such a mechanic in place of "natural 20 critical hits" and describes the procedure thus:

When a damage result of "6" is rolled, the player gets to roll another d6 and add the result to the previous 6 points of damage. So a "critical hit" essentially means 1d6+6 points of damage, or 9.5 points of damage on average. And 1 in 6 hits is "critical" on average, a grisly figure that lines up better with my gritty pulp sensibilities than 1 in 20.

Like Al, I have been feeling a bit bored with "roll a natural 20 = double damage" critical hit system that I have been using -- well, forever.  I feel that the exploding damage system could indeed serve as a reasonable replacement for standard critical hits and, as Al points out, actually allows many more chances for higher damage infliction, a 1 in 6 chance vs. a 1 in 20 chance.  But this raises two corollary concerns:

(1)  What to do with natural 20 "to hit" rolls?

and:

(2)  Since I use variable weapon damage (unlike Al, who uses d6's for everything), would this make "exploding" damage die rolls too potent?  In other words, by increasing the occurrence of increased damage, will this make things too bloody and/or deadly in my "variable weapon damage" based campaign?  And if so, is that necessarily a bad thing?

As I commented on Al's blog, my initial response to concern #1 is that if I go with "exploding" damage then the natural 20 "to hit" roll should automatically grant "exploded" damage, i.e., d6+6, d8+8, d10+10, etc.

My response to issue #2 is more complicated, and remains undecided.  Interestingly, Crimson Blades of Ara, the homebrewed RPG that spawned the Lands of Ara campaign setting in the first place, featured a more deadly combat system than most variants of D&D: on average, two solid hits with a long sword would kill virtually any PC, regardless of that PC's experience level (CBoA did not technically use "levels," but you get my point).  So I am certainly open in principle to a more deadly and bloody world of combat for my current campaign.  But would that be too drastic a move to make at this juncture of the game?  I recently posted about how wonderful it is to have a party of characters of experience levels 3 and up -- so would it be fun or fair to suddenly raise the stakes and increase the danger of combat damage in the campaign now that we've just reached the "sweet spot"?  Perhaps especially since two of my players are neophyte RPG'ers playing in their first-ever campaign?

Freaks and Geeks Part 2 - Carlos the Dwarf!

I got some nice comments in response to my prior post about Freaks and Geeks, a really GREAT and funny 1999 show about 1980s high school life.  I myself strongly identify with the boys in the younger "geek" crowd from this program -- I was probably something of a cross between Neal Schweiber (Samm Levine) and Sam Weir (John Francis Daley) in my own high school days (1986-89).  So I thought I'd revisit those Freaks and Geeks memories again by posting a few pics featuring rising star and all-around Renaissance man James Franco, who played the "scoundrel with a heart of gold" Daniel Desario in F&G.  In the show's final episode, "Discos and Dragons," Daniel gets invited by Harris (the Dungeon Master) to participate in an AD&D session, and plays the memorable character "Carlos the Dwarf."  Given that their session ends with Carlos rescuing the princess, Daniel must be a natural RPG'er!

Daniel rolls up "Carlos the Dwarf."

Daniel gets into the spirit of the game.

"Greetings, princess.  It is I, Carlos the Dwarf.  The dragon has been slain and you are free to rule your kingdom."

More Pop-Cultural References

Inspired by recent posts by Jeff Rients and Michael Curtis, I offer my personal favorite pop-cultural D&D reference, from Freaks and Geeks:

The geeks at the game table.

Harris the Dungeon Master!

B/X Companion Ordered!

I just got some holiday $$$ in the mail from my folks today, and after dashing into town to deposit the $$$ and buy some much-needed groceries and gas, my next act of consumerism was to head over to JB's B/X Blackrazor blog and at long last order my copy of the B/X Companion!  Hopefully this will be merely the first sortie in a much larger holiday-related RPG accessories spending spree.  But for right now, I plan to relish my immediate victory and spend the afternoon reveling in the excitement of ordering -- and now anticipating the arrival of -- that B/X Companion!

THANKS Mom and Dad!!

Magic Items For Sale - Cheap!

One of the qualities that distinguishes Ara from many other D&D campaign settings is that, due to the presence of a powerful Enchanters' Guild, magical items are actually available for sale in many areas of the continent.  This is especially true in the Free City of Kaladar and in Minoch, the latter being the region where my current PC adventuring party is exploring Stonehell.  Minoch is in fact home to the single largest Enchanters' Guild facility in all of Ara, so my players are well-placed to gain access to Magic Items for sale in Minochian towns like Fortinbras and Farn Junction.

What this means for me practically is that I have had to start pricing these magical items.  True to my nature, I have been largely making up gp figures on the fly for enchanted items the PCs seek, since the monetary system in Crimson Blades of Ara, the homebrewed RPG system from whence the Enchanters' Guild concept emerged, was based upon a silver standard and is not easily converted to the D&D item pricing scale.

Also true to my nature, I had more or less forgotten that the AD&D DMG has resale prices listed for magical items --  a fact I had to be reminded of by reading a recent post of JB's on the B/X xp system.  So for several sessions now, most notably those two recent sessions the PCs spent in Fortinbras, I have been making up magical item prices without any reference to the DMG.  However, once I remembered (thanks to JB's post) that the DMG lists magic item resale prices, I decided to check those lists out, compare them to what I have come up with so far, and see where this lands me in terms of "standardizing" magical item prices in the Arandish campaign setting.

That said, I should briefly disclaim that I think magical items shouldn't really have stable prices.  As I have previously posted, despite the presence of the Enchanters' Guild, magical items are somewhat uncommon in Ara, the availability of Dwarven Steel being a far more typical means by which adventurers acquire more-potent-than-standard weapons and equipment.  But, since Dwarven Steel cannot itself be enchanted, and therefore cannot take the place of, say, a ring of invisibility or a +3 Flame Tongue, I know there is demand for magical items in Ara.  But the Arandish Enchanters are notorious price-gougers, and so prices for these sparsely dispersed and highly sought-after items should vary a lot and should always be quite high, by my reckoning.

So let's take a look at those prices. What follows is a partial list of some representative items that the Arandish PCs have been buying and/or pricing, with my own "from the hip" prices listed first, and the DMG prices (taken from pp. 121-125) listed in square brackets.


potion of healing: 150gp  [400gp]
potion of extra-healing: 400gp  [800gp]
+1 Battle Axe: 300gp  [2,500gp]
+2 Battle Axe: 650gp
+1 Polearm: 450gp [2,000gp for a +1 Sword]
+2 heavy crossbow: 700gp [3,500gp for a +1 bow]
each +1 hvy. bolt = 50gp, 300-350gp for 10 [300gp for 2-20 +2 bolts]
+2 heavy flail: 800gp
Potion of Plant Control: 140gp [300gp]
Scroll of Ward against Magic: 100 gp [4,500gp for Protection from Magic]
Ring of Protection, 800gp per +1 = 1600gp for +2, 2500gp for +3 [10,000 - 20,000gp]
Decanter of Endless Water, 5000gp [3,000gp]
Staff of Striking: 1400gp [15,000gp]
wand of paralyzation: 500gp with ten charges [25,000gp]
Ring of Invisibility 3,000gp, on special 2,800gp [7,500gp]
Scarab of Protection : 650gp  [25,000gp]
Stone of Summon Earth Elemental: 5,000gp  [12,5000gp]
Eye of the Eagle monacle on a kestrel hood, 300gp  [18,000gp for two such Eyes]
Rope of Climbing: 1,000gp [10,000gp]
Girdle of Giant Strength: 2,000gp [2,500gp]


So, in general, I have been seriously lowballing most of these items' prices vis-a-vis their listed resale value in the AD&D DMG.  Yet for a few of these items -- e.g., the Girdle of Giant Strength and the various potions -- my prices have been pretty damn close to the DMG's, and in one or two cases (e.g., the Decanter of Endless Water, a fetish object of Hazel's), my price has even been higher.  Now part of that variance I attribute to the perceived rarity of such items, and since the Arandish campaign world features industrial-scale enchanters who offer their services openly, I would expect that certain items gauged to be extremely rare in AD&D might be more commonly available in Ara -- and hence a bit cheaper.

Yet all in all, I am inclined to raise my campaign's magic item prices to bring them more in line with the ranges given in the DMG for all but the most common magical items listed above.  By "common magical items" I refer to healing potions and +1 weapons.

I can justify this upward price adjustment without retroactively penalizing the PCs by claiming that on their previous town visit, the party was there during a major regional holiday with an accompanying "clearance sale" offered by the local Enchanters once every fifty years or so.  No harm, no foul!

But from now on I will be keeping that DMG list handy, and while I may still keep Arandish prices a bit lower than the DMG does in many cases, I will likely use the DMG tables as a starting point for magic item pricing in Minoch.  All such items would be even more expensive in regions north of Kaladar, where Dwarven Steel is more common and Enchanters far less numerous.

Lastly, just for reference, for the custom enchantment of a +1 crowbar a Fortinbras Enchanter charged Yor the cost of the implement (2gp) + 200gp and a 2-day wait.  In line with the above discussion, I think I will need to raise the price of custom enchantment jobs as well, though I think that that rate for a +1 crowbar (a fairly minor, if damned cool, item) is pretty reasonable in retrospect.  But maybe it would have cost more like 500gp or even higher on a non-festival, non-"clearance sale" day.

Blood and Guts, Literally: Stonehell Sausage Making

After a couple of weeks of threatening to start contributing to the Lands of Ara blog, I'm finally on it, with this episode bringing you the adventures of Uncle Junkal (Bard) and Innominus (Cleric) in their real-world incarnations doing a (hopefully) recurring food segment for Lands of Ara.

Just so you know where I, thoust Spawn of Endra, stand: I think food is Old School. I've been eating food since 1973. I had my lunches in those Little Brown Bags through the 70s and 80s, and even when Hasbro bought out the license to food, I still ate the food I wanted to eat the way I wanted it cooked every day ... several times a day, in fact! Except when I was traveling: then it behooves one to accept the local fare. Anyway ....

So a Cleric and a Bard ... let's get the easy yuks out of the way. There'll be no "Innominus casts Cure Lite Ham", or "Uncle Junkal casts Charm Guests". When we play Lab Lord we skin dead humanoids (and wear the skins as disguises) and fire bomb their temples before you can say boo. When we get together to cook, it's going to be serious. The other day, we attempted to make what must be the staple of the Oldest of the Sausage-Making Schools: Blood Sausage.

I have experience with blood sausage (aka BLACK PUDDINGS! Don't try to test how Old School I am ... I ate the Monster Manual for breakfast in Europe when I was 5 years old!) since I was a little kid visiting family in Ireland. Uncle Junkal's player had some positive experiences with a Korean form of blood sausage, soondae. I never found a suitable recipe for making an Irish version, and we decided to move forward with the soondae following this recipe. And so we hunkered down for a session more than twice as long as our usual gaming session: 9 hours.

Here's the first cogent admonishment:

"We're goin' to Hell! You better know how to make blood sausage fool! It's all you're gonna get!"

And we're off! Most of the stuffing is sweet rice and sweet potato noodles, and of course blood. Here we see two little gelatinous blobs of congealed pig blood from a blood farm in Washington state:


The one on the bottom separated along a stratum of fat or plasma and one half fell on the floor. Luckily we could clean it, but this was only the beginning of the bloodshed. (Does Raggi have a module where there's a tool shed literally full of blood? Probably.) Uncle Junkal started to work the stuff with a +1 potato masher and eventually added Bigby's Squelching Hand.


Then of course we have the guts. Again we are using pig parts, obtained from a local butcher. These are called 'casings' in the lingo of the pros, not intestines or guts, if you need to impress somebody or pose as an international sausage expert (and after this experience, I don't recommend posing at this kind of thing; the truth will out). These are cheap, $1.79. Cheaper than an Old School pdf.


Here's some dialog that accompanies this screenshot from the video:

SOE: "That's something like 8 or 10 feet, the [butcher] lady thought, of guts shoved onto a ... industrial automotive funnel. And then we're going to squeeze into that -- with a dowel that we bought -- chopped with a machete ... fans of machetes will recognize that style of chopping (if I can get it into focus) ...



but we're going to use THIS end, obviously [the flat squared-off end].



UJ: "That'll be interesting, I'll film you doing that.

SOE: "Excellent!"

Of course it was all high hopes at that point. Crueler realities lay ahead. Once these were packed and made to look all sausagey (I mean those DO look like real sausages, right?):


and the boiling process began, what was meant by "don't pack the stuffing too tightly or the sausage may split open during cooking" became clear. You've got token quantities of blood, and you've got under-cooked rice and glass noodles as stuffing ... then you're going to boil them for 45 minutes. Any dipshit not entangled in this situation knows what will happen. As the boiling proceeded, Uncle Junkal and I start to see these sausages we packed burst open one after another and the contents boil away into a sorry sorry gruel:



I never read Oliver Twist, but I hope that little bastard wasn't pleading for this swirling bucket of junk. Bad scene. UJ correctly proposed puncturing the boiling sausages and I pulled some of them out to bake, neither of which prevented a massive loss of sausages ...

Was it a TSK? No. ONE god-damned Ishmael of a sausage survived the boiling, still tethered embryonically to his neighboring links; and four or five non-exploded baked sausages survived. But this image of one of the exploded remnants still connected to the links that were baked sums up the grotesquerie. It started out ~6" long (click to enlarge, seriously):



The first cat I had as a kid (she was named Greycloud by my sister) left something quite similar to this on our doorstep one night, which at first I took to be the guts of some rodent, or maybe an opposum, and then eventually realized had a fetus in it. Or maybe this is a phantasmagoria of misremembrance. Anyway, it looked a lot like this.

So, after all that we ate the ones (the sausages, I mean, not Greycloud's entrail-offerings) that survived with some bok choy that UJ stir-fried, and god damn it these are pretty bland sausages. Really no spices, no pepper ... if you're at the point where you're so desperate you're keeping blood for food, add some salt! The recipe itself I think is a crappy recipe. I can't imagine that soondae is normally this bland, given the general spiciness of Korean cuisine. Even the Irish, to whom spices outside of pepper are almost unknown, pack a lot of flavor into their blood puddings. Death to this recipe.

But, the idea was to learn some things about Old School sausage making. I imagine we made something on the par of what an adventurer might get as part of an average meal at a tavern in some medievaloid setting (3 cp). As my experiences elsewhere have shown, poor subsistence farmers and "tavern owners" in regions where subsistence is the main mode of food acquisition don't have the access to meat that folks in industrialized economies enjoy (i.e, they don't eat meat every day). The predominantly meat sausage (as opposed to a largely grain-based filler sausage) as a norm must be a relatively recent development; though probably of course this relates to industrialization and the ability to 'recover' or 'mechanically separate' meats and other edible bits like integument, shredded tendons and glands that can then be economized into sausages as 'meat'. Anyway, there are books written on this stuff, by people with knowledge, not me.

Onward to Stonehell!

The "Sweet Spot" of an Adventure Campaign

My Arandish Campaign 2010, begun last January, has now entered what I consider to be the "sweet spot" of any ongoing D&D adventure campaign: the portion where the player characters are all at least 3rd level, but haven't yet advanced much beyond 5th or 6th level.  From this point until the PCs start hitting the double-digit experience levels, we are in for some really fantastic gaming.

Why?  Part of my reasoning here has to do with the numbers themselves: the PCs have made it past those first few vulnerable levels and are, at this point, somewhat less likely to be instantly killed by, say, a lucky battle-axe strike by a hobgoblin.  Now, to be fair, I am probably something of a "kind" DM, particularly at lower levels; I always reward players for thinking or negotiating their way out of conflicts, and I rarely allow their foes to vastly outnumber them or out-strategize them unless they (the PCs) do something especially imprudent or dumb.  I mean, I let the dice fall where they may, and character death still occurs -- our group has had two PC deaths so far -- yet I admit that I am secretly rooting for the PCs at low levels.  Perhaps I am a sucker for the underdog.

Not so anymore.  Now that the PCs are all at 3rd level and above, I feel much more freedom to hurl more deadly and pernicious monsters and foes at them.  For example, simply perusing the monster listings at the back of my Advanced Edition Companion, I notice some much-beloved creatures in the 5-8 HD range: the hydra, the owlbear, the basilisk, the minotaur, the troll, the cave bear, the remorhaz, the 8-HD elementals. . . . These are the kinds of delightful fiends I can now deploy with reckless abandon, because the party should be (more or less) ready for them.

However, beyond these matters of game mechanics is the realm where my heart truly lies: the ongoing "story" of the adventure and the characters.  Of course, I use that term loosely because I would never reduce an RPG to being the mere recounting of a story; I agree with many other (and wiser) old-schoolers that D&D is first and foremost a game.  But as DM, my role in that game is to provide at least some possible adventure hooks and plots for the characters to pursue, lines of action and exploration that might develop into something like a collaboratively generated "plot" -- and in that collaboration, I get to supply the villains!  So, in addition to the higher-HD monsters listed above, this is the point in the campaign where I get to start introducing the upper- (or at least middle-) management villains, the NPCs who are actually running things and actively plotting to do (horrible, exploitative, destructive) stuff in the game-world the PCs have been exploring.  The PCs will start becoming aware of these key players and, should they so choose, may decide to actively intervene in those nefarious NPCs' affairs -- thus making exciting new long-term enemies!

Of course, that process has already begun -- readers of my session reports are aware that Uncle Junkal has already rubbed some undead entities the wrong way by stealing their mirror, and the PCs in general have pissed off both the lizardfolk of Stonehell and the hobgoblinish Skullface Occupational Army -- but the PCs and I are in for a whole new level of adventure as they start meeting some of the behind-the-scenes string-pullers instead of (mostly) mucking about fighting with the rank-and-file.  THAT is why I particularly relish the sessions immediately ahead -- things are really beginning to get interesting.

At the meta-game level, I am also thinking about and planning for what will happen when the PCs reach level 9 and beyond.  In my earlier AD&D-playing days, nobody I ever played with payed any attention to the "build a stronghold" rules that kick in at the titled levels -- we just kept adventuring around, albeit in increasingly difficult modules (e.g., Q1).  Yet for my current Arandish Labyrinth Lord Campaign, I plan to play it much more "by the book," and therefore will expect my PCs to claim land and erect strongholds starting at Level 9.

On top of that, I am also open to seeing this campaign continue through to PC levels in and beyond the "teens," which is why I plan to use some holiday money I have coming from my folks to purchase JB's B/X Companion -- I need to start planning for higher-level play and -- gulp! -- an ENDGAME.

But that is all a long way down the road, and for the time being I am simply going to kick back and enjoy the "sweet spot" we find ourselves in -- starting next session!