Another Game (2): DungeonTeller

I was really happy to discover a free, new RPG called DungeonTeller yesterday. It reminded me in some ways of KIWF, because your ability to fight is affected by your health. From the introduction:

This game is designed as family fun in the spirit of classic fantasy roleplaying games, where you and your friends take the role of a band of heroes venturing into dark caverns in search of mystery, riches, and danger. I’ve loved those games for thirty years, and I do have a soft spot for them, but I must be getting old, because I don’t have the patience for the complexity of traditional roleplaying games. This game is the result.
What’s different about this game? You can get a DungeonTeller game started in five minutes, without lots of dice-rolling and writing down numbers. Elect a game master, pick a role for your character, grab a free adventure from my blog (coming soon, I hope), and let the adventure begin.
When we play, “dad” is the game master, and the heroes are a group of our friends and their kids. Even folks who have never played an RPG will be able to pick up the basics right away. I’ve tried to replace gamer lingo with plain speech – no “hit points”, “saves”, or “critical hits” in here.

In DungeonTeller, each player has luck (taking the place of HP in traditonal games) and associated pools dice (rolling 5s and 6s nets you success). These dice act as both your hit points and your fancy-power enablers. If you run out of luck any hit could end you, but the rules are written with an attitude that failure is just a complication to be overcome, suggesting things like TPKs are actually everyone getting caught, etc.

Anyways, the beauty of the system's streamlining is very appealing to me, and there is lots of material for it already. It is really intuitive, making it good for bringing people into the fold of roleplayerdom.

Get the main rules here.
Get the monsters here.
Get class rules (also included in the main rules) here to facilitate a quick pick up and play session.

The First Kill It With Fire Art Not by Me

Introducing the work of Scott, who, in a miraculous series of events went from being a fellow internet -famous (within the J-vlogging community*) dude to a reader of the blog and a player in my DCC beta campaign on Google+. Scott says his pieces were inspired by the examples of play I gave in the original KIWF rules.

I'm going to add these to spice up said rules, and hopefully sometime soon we can put together a PDF with the system and illustrations. If you want to send in some fanart (dare I call it that?) shoot me a line.

*: In case you are wondering, I am here, but haven't put out a decent video in ages and you probably aren't interested in Japan. Of course the Carcosa review may interest you.

New Rules and an update: Rolls Contested and Harsh

This post was recently edited; please note the rules change if you are the non-extant persons playing this game.

KIWF rules stuff this post.

Contested Rolls: For contested rolls, where two people want to do something, have each person roll one die for each pip they have in the appropriate trait. Each person nets a success for rolling at their pips or under for that trait. Re-roll ties.

Initiative will be decided by contested rolls too. This is a change from the earlier rules that will be retroactively edited into them.

Example: Orr the Caller of Squamous Things is in a race with Filgreese, Long of Beard to get to the top of a chasm and claim some booty. They both roll a die for each pip they have in their Prowess trait, as this trait represents the athleticism they will need to make the climb. 
Orr has 3 pips and rolls 3 dice resulting in rolls of 1, 3, and 5, getting a total of 2 successful rolls. Filgreese has 2 pips and rolls 2 dice resulting in a 5 and 6, thus getting a total of 0 successes. Orr wins and reaches the top first.


Later a sore Filgreese challenges Orr to a drinking contest. They roll a die for each pip in their Body trait to see who is the last man standing.

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Optional Rule: Difficult and Extraordinary Checks: Sometimes the referee may determine that a challenge is particularly devious or requires doing well over an extended period of time. In such situations, the player must make the check twice or more and succeed each time.

Example: Shreva of His Dark Purview is trying to create an artificial man using the knowledge she gleamed from an accursed tome. The referee has her player make one Brains check every day for three days (in game time). She gets an extra die for each roll because she has a special regent listed in the ritual's description.

Creature Mechanic: Lingering and Regenerating

Two new creature mechanics that can give a creature some staying power. Keep in mind the system has folk roll their hit dice for each encounter and typically you only lose one hit die per attack you take.

Lingering may be appropriate for ghosts, swarms, slimes, etc. Regeneration is for creatures with heavy duty supernatural healing. Use both for a nightmare creature that will make your players throttle you.

Lingering: When this creature would lose a hit die in combat, instead reroll it. If the result is a one, it loses it as usual.

Lingering Hardcore: And for a small, hydra-esque twist, if the rerolled die comes up as a certain number, like say a six, the creature also gets to roll a bonus hit die too!

Regenerating: On each of its turns, this creature rerolls a previously lost hit die unless it took damage from its vunerablities list within the last round.

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Lastly, I know my art up there kinda sucks (those are supposed to be ghostly carp up there), but in my defense I am out of practice, photographed it straight out of a moleskin, and made it without any penciling first.

5E - What works in D&D

In their article at Beyond the Black Gate, the author talks about something that was relevant to my own RPGs.

With all the speculation floating around about what 5E could possibly look like, or what folks would like it to look like, its interesting to ponder what exactly makes D&D work in the first place. The simple fact that people are out there still playing the earliest iteration of D&D means that there are some definite "core" elements that keep this game alive.

One of the first things that springs to mind is the Hit Die. This is, I think, the most important baseline of the game, and what everything else is built off of. Starting with OD&D, the baseline is this: a creature has 1 HD, or 1d6 hit points. An attack against it with, say, a sword, does 1d6 points of damage.

This is deceptively simple, but its an important reason why D&D works. Starting with this baseline, a regular sword has a chance to kill a regular guy in 1 round. The randomness of tossing dice to determine the regular guys hit points, whether or not you hit the regular guy, and how much damage you do if you do hit the regular guy, means nothing is predetermined, nothing can be taken for granted, and there will always be an element of risk.

As a baseline, this means you have something to measure against when someone gets better than the average guy (or "levels up"). More hit points, a better chance of hitting, etc. Or maybe your magic sword gets better than the regular sword. It lets you quantify tough concepts in a simple way that doesn't take hours to figure out, or bog down your game resolving simple combats so you can get on to the rest of the session.

As the rules stand now, players in the Kill It With Fire RPG don't start as "regular guys" because they get 1 HD for each body point they have, as well as their level in hit dice, but DMs looking for a more risky starting game could certainly have players start at 1 HD.

As for monsters, the hit die allocating will mostly represent flavor; cannon fodder like goblins or normal people will usually have one measly hit die. NPCs don't follow the same rules as PCs. They are just there to be fun challenges.

Two sessions and a fifth itteration

Yesterday and today, I played two different kinds of roleplaying games. Then I saw the news that 5th edition D&D will be announced. An announcement of an announcement, if you will.

Yesterday was a forth edition D&D game. A rather tough series of battles through a Goodman Games module that saw us taking on an average of 3 encounters back to back with no rests in-between. When we ran to the top of our collapsing tower and saw the shadow dragon before us, I thought we were screwed. Heck, I had already died once... before I luckily remembered that I had taken a second wind and actually couldn't get killed after all.

But I locked that dragon down with one hand and held on for dear life. Luckily, the brawler sub-class that I play is quite powerful against creatures of even draconic strength, and between the grab and our bonuses to hit and the dragon's penalties, we were able to make surprisingly short work of it. But the whole time I was thinking what a pain it was to remember every little condition, every aura, every save that must be made, and every bonus or penalty. I cheered with the rest of the group when we killed that dragon (we even did a three-man eiffel tower*), but basically, I came away from the experience thinking, once again, about what a pain it is to play type IV D&D. Goodman Games make it as fun as possible though.

On the other side of the spectrum, tonight saw my first Google+ online game, and it was brilliant. I was DMing a session of DCC beta, which is also put out by Goodman Games. We had a map that I used for referencing room dimensions every once in a while, but otherwise it was all theater-of-the-mind style. Things were so much simpler, the combat was over quickly yet dramatically. It's definitely my preferred style of play.

So what I hope is, that since Wizards has extended its hand to say, "hey, you guys will like us if we let you playtest, right?" They will listen to voices like mine. With my own RPG, I've tried to actually distil a few of the parts of 4e I like. There are no saves in my game, nor AC, but the three defenses in Kill It With Fire are inspired by 4e's approach to hurting things. I also like the powers-as-a-balancing-slash-engaging element of 4e that give everyone cool things to do, and some of that flavor makes it into abilities, though I try to have them be less tactical, less board game or video game-like.

Last year was, from my perspective, a major watershed in D&D, with the edition wars and retro-clones' prominence. We will see if D&D survives. I think it would be a shame if it died because it became economically inviable, but as long as someone out there still plays, its spirit will live on.

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*I thought I would provide a link to an IT Crowd episode with a reference, but now I think I may have imagined the practice. My version of eiffel towering is to go for a high five and then hold the pose/hands in the air for an awkwardly long amount of time. Is that how the original episode did it?

Creature Ability: Tough

Just had an idea for a mechanic that could be applied to really tough targets, such as iron animated statues.

If you haven't read the Kill It With Fire rules, let me paraphrase the armor rules here: For each armor die you have, it reduces incoming damage by its pip rating (being removed if matched) and if any damage goes over that, the armor die is removed from play and the extra damage is applied to hit dice (armor dice come back after combat when you repair your armor).

But creatures with the Tough ability will have an extra, armor-like advantage: Each hit die also acts as an armor die, so it first reduces incoming damage by its pip rating then absorbs damage as usual. Meaning some creatures will never lose HP if something can't deal enough damage to beat its highest hit die's pip rating.

There is nothing to stop a Tough creature from wearing separate armor on its body, but this trait is mainly intended for creatures of naturally high fortitude, such as dragons.

Since hit die in KIWF are rolled at the beginning of each combat, you may get lucky and catch a monster with a measly 3 pips on its highest die, or you may run into a particularly strong monster with the dreaded 6 pips. Monsters could be even more dangerous if you are using alternate dice rules as well (KIWF uses d6s in the base rules).