Rethinking Rations

At my game table I have a bowl filled with poker chips. At the start of every game, my players look at their inventory and pull out a number of white chips equal to their ammunition, red chips equal to their torches/lantern oil, and blue chips equal to their rations. As we play, chips go into the bowl when these consumables are used, and come out of the bowl when they’re purchased. When the game ends, the players count their chips, and update their character sheets. It’s an efficient system which allows me to be strict about consumable use, without requiring my players to perform a lot of annoying bookkeeping. I think I originally got the idea from Telecanter.

Prior to using this system I was the bad sort of GM who just hand-waved consumables out of the game because they were too much of a pain in the ass to keep track of. I find I enjoy the game much more since I’ve started using this system, though. Tracking ammunition has the largest impact on the game, since players need to be much more conscious about how frequently they use their bows. After a few hours of frequent combat, the ranger starts to get nervous, and that makes the game exciting. Tracking light sources has less of an impact, but it serves as a timer for how long your players can travel underground. Gods help them if they use more than half of their lantern oil on the way down into the dungeon.

Rations, on the other hand, have yet to play any important role in my games. My players track them because I’ve told them they need to do that. They dutifully toss a chip into the bowl at the end of each adventuring day, and when they free a prisoner or find someone in need, they share their poker chips with that person. But tracking rations has never served an actual purpose in the year or more that I’ve been doing it. It’s just a rote action of taking chips out of, and putting them back into the bowl. What is the point?

I don’t want to return to hand-waving rations because of this issue. Limited food resources has too much potential value. There’s a huge desert in the northern part of the continent my players are on. If they ever try to travel there, days away from any town, running out of food is going to be a serious concern. I’ve also begun work on a megadungon which extends dozens of levels beneath the earth. Again, in that situation, the possibility of starving is going to create excitement and urgency in the game. I won’t sacrifice that. But I also don’t want to continue tracking rations day-by-day, purchase-by-purchase for all the sessions where there’s no actual danger of food running out.

Starting with my next Pathfinder session in a couple weeks I’m going to switch things up. First off, I’ve been having players track 1 week’s worth of rations as 1 significant item using my encumbrance system. (A system which I intend to revisit and revise soon). Based on how much food actually weighs, rations in my game are far too light. Looking over military rations used by the U.S. within the last 30 years shows that a single meal can weigh as much as 2.7lb using relatively modern technology. Assuming three meals a day, a week’s rations is nearly 60lb! That’s hardly in line with other significant items, such as a greatsword, which might weight 10lb. Three days of food, at about 25lb, seems like a much more reasonable weight for a single significant item.

Having determined how a character’s carrying capacity converts into food, I’ll then have my players tell me how much of that carrying capacity they’re willing to devote to food. If they allocate 1 significant item to rations, then they have 3 days worth. If they allocate 2 SI, then they have 6 days worth, and so on. It will be assumed that any time the players visit civilization, (barring extenuating circumstances), they’ll find time to purchase food. The cost will be rolled into their standard upkeep costs. Using this method, the players can just write “6 days of food (2 SI)” on their inventory sheet. All I need to do is ask once every 3 days away from civilization if the players have enough food. If they do, we continue on without a hitch, if they don’t, then things start to get interesting.

Using this system should maintain all of the interesting aspects of tracking rations, but reduce the bookkeeping aspects to a minimum.

The Legend of Zelda Adventure System: Problems

As a game designer, I’m a complete novice. More of a novice than I thought I would be, actually. After rebuilding every game I’ve ever played so many times, researching game design theories, and running this blog for a year, I thought game design would come a little more naturally to me. I didn’t expect to be some kind of prodigy or anything. I’ve been alive long enough to realize that every new venture will prove more difficult than it seems from the outside looking in. All the same, I’ve been surprised by the challenges of designing a game from the ground up.

What I’ve learned is that even though I have a solid grasp of some elements of game design, there are others which I’ve simply never tried fiddling before. Yes, I’ve rebuilt Pathfinder a dozen times, but I only changed the parts that I was interested in improving. There’s a lot more to the game which I never had to think about, because I never felt like it needed to improve. I let the game’s original designers handle those elements for me. Now that I’m trying to build a game from scratch, I’m ill prepared for the task of building a fresh approach to these elements.

Dungeons, for example, have proven to be a larger problem for me than I suspected they would. When I was originally deciding what my goals were for the Legend of Zelda Adventure System, I knew that dungeons would be a large part of it. In a Zelda game, most of the play takes place within dungeons, so it makes sense that much of the LOZAS system would be dungeon focused, yes? But a Zelda dungeon isn’t like a D&D dungeon, and I would like that to be represented by the system, rather than simply letting the game become another D&D clone.

I recognize that I’ll need to make compromises. As I’ve said before, throwing pots and pushing blocks doesn’t translate well to tabletop. A lot of Zelda dungeons have “timing” challenges, where you need to move through the room at a certain rate to avoid obstacles like monsters, spinning blades, or bursts of flame. Challenges such as those won’t function when the game isn’t being played in real time. However, in other ways, I think there are elements of Zelda dungeons which can be translated to tabletop. For example, many Zelda dungeon have a focus on traveling between sub-levels repeatedly in order to progress through to the end. There’s also the tradition of a dungeon requiring multiple keys, as well as including a map, compass, and ‘big key.’ These are things which could work well as a tabletop challenge.

What I would like to do is create a simple method GMs could use to build dungeons in this style. Something not unlike Gary Gygax’s “appendix A” in the DMG, which could be used to randomly generate dungeons, although this would not be entirely random. Ideally it would require a little more time and decision making on the part of the GM, while still streamlining the dungeon building process enough that it doesn’t require hours to accomplish the task. But this is new ground for me. I’ve never been the greatest at designing dungeons in the first place, so completing this aspect of the game has proven to be a challenge. Maybe I’ll scale back on just how ambitious it is, but I’d like to give my vision a solid try before I start making concessions.

Another element of the LOZAS system which has been something of a puzzle to me is combat. I’ve already posted a collection of notes I have for the system, but in many ways I’m not satisfied with them. As one commenter pointed out, combat in Zelda isn’t like combat in existing games. It is neither combat as sport nor is it combat as war. It’s combat as a puzzle. Enemies move in a very particular way and have a particular method of attack, and the goal of the player is to get past them, either by avoiding them or by killing them. But killing them is only a single method of completing the puzzle, and not always the best one.

Like the timed obstacles I mentioned above, I don’t think there’s any real way to translate this style of combat to tabletop, because again, it’s not in real time. However, I would like to capture its spirit as best I can. At present, the system which has developed from my notes is the best I’ve been able to come up with. but I can’t help but feel that there’s a better option out there. Something which further reduces combat time, while still forcing the player to think about combat enough that it isn’t something they can simply skip over.

I like the idea of having numerous monsters which are used sparingly, and having each monster require the players to come up with some kind of tactic to defeat it. Hitting it with swords will work eventually, but it would never be as effective as coming up with a clever solution. Such as, in the case of a leaping skeleton, tricking it into leaping off of a cliff or into a pool of lava.

So yeah, these are some of the problems I’ve been encountering lately as I work on the Legend of Zelda Adventure System. And just so we’re clear:

I love it.

I won’t deny that there was a certain satisfaction to the early stages of the design process, when ideas for how to improve the game were just falling out of my head faster than I could write them down. But this, honestly, is better. Even if it’s a little less fun in the short term. Hitting a wall and learning how to climb over it, that’s REAL problem solving. That’s how I know I’m not just retreading old ground. I’m not regurgitating something I’ve seen before and simply forgotten about, or combining elements from other more successful games. I’m learning.

And if you ask me, that’s the whole point of doing anything in the first place anyway.

Investigating Ability Scores

If you haven’t yet, there’s only 6 days left to fill out the first annual Papers & Pencils survey!

When you sit down to create an entirely new RPG from scratch, where do you start? I don’t know if there’s a particular method used by more experienced game designers, but the handful of times I’ve attempted it, I always start in the same place: how does the player create their character? It’s the closest thing to a ‘logical’ starting place that I can think of. Nearly every mechanic in every RPG I’ve ever looked at relates either to how the characters can affect the game world, or how the game world can affect them. And since the character needs to exist before it can affect or be affected, it seems like that’s the best place to start. So when I began making notes for the game system I mentioned yesterday, that is what I did.

From there, I chose to start with the most fundamental building block of a character: ability scores. I’m sure there’s a system out there where characters don’t have any of ability scores, and it might be really good. But, for my purposes with this game, ability scores seem like the best way to go. Then came my first real decisions: how many ability scores, what do they represent, and how are they generated?

I am most familiar with the D&D base ability scores. There are six of them: Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. Numerous methods exist for determining the numbers associated with each ability, but all of them are just permutations on the original. The player rolls 3d6, six times. The basic score is a number between 3 and 18, weighted heavily towards scores of 10 or 11. When you look at OD&D or AD&D, it’s very clear why ability scores were set up this way. Rolling 3 dice makes the minimum and maximum scores very unlikely, so when a 17 or 18 is rolled, it’s a cherished event. Hell, I got excited when my OD&D Magic User Higgins rolled a 16 Intelligence. The maximum score of 18 also plays beautifully into the original “ability check” mechanic, where a player rolls 1d20 and compares it to the ability score they’re attempting to use. If the result of the d20 roll is less than or equal to their ability score, whatever they’re attempting succeeds. I love the way this mechanic makes the specific number of a character’s ability score significant, while also retaining an absolute 10% failure chance.

Modern versions of Dungeons and Dragons–including Pathfinder–retain the basics of this system, but have lost everything which made the systems elegant. By using larger dice pools, the game removes the rarity of high or low numbers. There are racial ability bonuses which can easily increase a character’s score to 20 at first level, and even extra ability points given to characters at every 4th level. This would kill that consistent 10% failure chance, if the ability check mechanic hadn’t been dropped in favor of rolling against a target number. As I understand it, D&D 4th edition dropped the die rolling aspect of entirely, using a ‘point buy’ system instead. The ability score range of 3-18 seems like nothing more than tradition at this point.

After seeing this example of a mechanic being used in a game where it doesn’t fit any longer, I wanted to make sure I didn’t just copy the system I was most familiar with. I needed to properly explore my alternatives, and thoroughly examining why a particular system was the right choice for this game. (Incidentally, this concern is what prompted me to question Reinventing the Wheel.) And what better way to explore my alternatives was to grab every game sourcebook I own, and look at how they handled ability scores, presented in no particular order.

Note that these are specifically from books I own, and not an exhaustive investigation into every system of ability scores ever used. I’ve also excluded the Adventurer Conqueror King and Dungeon Crawl Classic systems, since they both use a system based heavily on oldschool D&D.

The Deadlands RPG published in 1996 (which I picked up at a garage sale about a year ago, but have not yet taken a serious look at) has a whopping 10 ability scores, divided into two groups. There are the “Corporeal Traits,” which include Deftness, Nimbleness, Quickness, Strength, and Vigor; and the “Mental Traits,” which include Cognition, Knowledge, Mien, Smarts, and Spirit. Having not played the game it seems unfair to judge, but some of these seem awful similar to me. Deftness is defined as “Hand-eye coordination and manual dexterity. Great for shooting holes in things.” and Quickness is defined as “Reflexes and speed. Draw, pardner!” I get that there’s a difference, but is it really significant enough to add additional complication to a tabletop game? I would need a lot of convincing.

Ability scores are determined by drawing from a standard deck of playing cards, with the two jokers included. You draw 12 cards, discard 2. You then assign each card to one of your ten scores. The card is then compared to a chart. The number on the card determines which type of die you roll in association with that ability score, while the suit determines how many of that die you roll.

The game has a wild-west setting, so using playing cards as a mechanic makes sense. Aces & Eights did the same thing. But really it’s just a fancy method for assigning dice to abilities, and that idea has always interested me. The difference between having a 1d4 Strength and a 1d12 dexterity is a lot more interesting than the difference between a -2 Strength and a +4 Dexterity in Pathfinder.

The Serenity RPG was the first game I bought after D&D, but I still haven’t had the opportunity to play it! I blame none of my friends being big Firefly fans. And maybe it’s just as well–I’ve heard that the system is horribly broken.

Like Deadlands, the attributes in the Serenity RPG are die types, rather than numbers. Before play begins, the group selects which “heroic level” they’d like to play at, choosing from “Greenhorn,” “Veteran,” and “Big Damn Hero.” Each of the heroic levels has a different number of “Attribute Points” which are spent in creating a character. Again, they are divided into physical and mental, but with only 6 instead of 10: Agility, Strength, Vitality, Alertness, Intelligence, and Willpower. Dice are purchased for each of the scores, with each die costing a number of points equal to the number on its highest face. (A d6 costs 6 points, a d8 costs 8, etc.)

Personally, I’m not a fan of point-buy systems. I see their value as a means of balancing characters, but I find it far more fun when characters have a chance of being unusually flawed or gifted. None the less, I still like the dice idea. It’s something to think about.

Earthdawn is another system I picked up at a garage sale and never took a really look at. It appears to be more of a storytelling game, which is not my forte. Again it uses a sort of “point buy” system, ranging from 2-18, with the lowest numbers actually adding points to your pool if you take them. It also has an alternative method allowing characters to roll 3d6 for their scores. The actual scores are similar to D&D as well: dexterity, strength, toughness, perception, willpower, and charisma.

Whatever other interesting elements the game might have, it’s not particularly useful for this exercise.

Star Trek: The Next Generation RPG is notoriously bad. I couldn’t not buy it when I found it at a used book store a few years back, just for the sake of morbid curiosity. I’m honestly having a difficult time even understanding how this works. From what I can tell, there are actually only 5 attributes, which range from 1 to 5 for humans, and each attribute has two “edges” which a character can be particularly strong or particularly weak in. I honestly can’t decipher how this works by flipping through the book, but it seems similar to the WEG Star Wars RPG, which I’ll discuss below.

Gangbusters (first edition, 1982) has some seriously strange ability scores. It looks like each character has Muscle, Agility, Observation, Presence, Driving, and Luck. But each is rolled differently! For muscle, agility, and observation, the player rolls a percentile die. Modifiers go from +0 to +25, with a lower roll being better. The presence score is just rolled on a D10, with modifiers from 0 to 2. The driving score is the average of your agility and observation scores, and the luck score is just a percentile dice divided by two.

This is a mess. I don’t think there’s really any way to redeem it within the system’s mechanics. Though again, I should probably play it before I pass judgement. (If you haven’t figured it out: I own a great many systems I’ve never had an opportunity to play!)

I picked up the Batman Role Playing Game a little over a year ago because I found it at a used book store and was curious. Unlike some of the other RPGs I’ve picked up second had, I took a very serious look at it. My ladyfriend is a huge batman fan, and I had some fun ideas for a campaign where the players started out as thugs in Gotham city, constantly hounded by Batman. Unfortunately, I discovered that it was the worst system I’ve ever laid eyes on.

But lets stick to the attributes. This game has a nine of them. When I first read it, that seemed extremely excessive. But then, I hadn’t read anything about Deadwood yet. The attributes make up a cross-section, which I do find somewhat interesting. Three attributes are physical, three are mental, and three are spiritual. Of those, one in each category is an “Acting/Opposing” attribute, one is an “Effect Attribute,” and one is a “Resistance Attribute.” Once again, point-buy is used during character creation, so this isn’t of particular interest.

The Mouse Guard Roleplaying Game is god damned beautiful. It is based on the Burning Wheel role playing system, which I’ve had no prior experience with. Despite appearing to focus more on storytelling than gaming, the system is very interesting and I would like to learn more about it.

The game doesn’t have ability scores in the traditional sense, but it does have Nature, Will, Resources, and Circles. These can used and depleted through play, however, so perhaps this would be a good example of a system without ability scores.

Shadowrun, 1st edition, has 8 attributes for most characters, but has a 9th if the character is a magician. In some ways, this seems like a poor design choice to me. The purpose of ability scores, as I view them, is to be the most basic, fundamental, and universal expression of what a character can do. An Orc Barbarian who cannot cast spells still has an Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma score.

But, on the other hand, I can see this making a certain amount of sense in a setting where mystical abilities are completely inaccessible to those who were not born with them.

The way attributes are generated is also interesting. It’s a point-buy system, with some complexities that are a little reminiscent of Gangbusters, but much more refined. There are five columns to choose from in creating a character from scratch: Magic, Attributes, Skills, Tech, and Race. The player is given five importance ratings, 0 through 4, and they must assign one rating to each of the five columns. They will receive more or less resources in each of the five categories, depending on how important they rate them. Giving attributes an importance rating of 0 gives you 15 points to spend, while an importance rating of 4 gives you 30 points.

The six physical and mental attributes can each range from 1 to 6 for humans. The three mystical attributes each work a little differently. All characters start with an Essence of 6, which decreases as they add cyberware implants, or if they are healed improperly. Reaction is the average of Quickness and Intelligence, but is also reduced by cyberware implants.

Magic rating is the ninth attribute which only magic users posses, and I don’t actually understand why it exists based on these rules. It starts at 6, and “declines with essence rating.” I can’t figure out why they would need a seperate ability if–by all appearances–magic should always be equal to essence. But as I’m not intimately familiar with the system, I’m sure there’s something I’m missing.

Traveller (2008, Mongoose) has one of the coolest character creation systems ever, wherein the players must make a number of decisions and roll on a number of charts to generate their character’s entire lifetime prior to the point that play begins. Rolling the six basic ability scores, however, is straightforward. Roll 2d6 six times and assign them in any order. It’s simple, but works.

I like the idea of using two dice to generate an ability score rather than 3. The roll is still weighted towards the center, but both high and low scores will be more common.

And lastly, we come to the West End Games Star Wars Role Playing Game. I love this game. And, as it turns out, I’ve written about its ability scores before. So if you don’t mind, I’ll just quote myself:

WEG Star Wars characters have six basic attributes; Dexterity, Knowledge, Perception, Strength, Mechanical, and Technical. Each of these has a certain number of six sided dice attached to it during character creation. (WEG Star Wars only uses six sided dice.) For example, a human character gets 18 dice total, and has a minimum of 2 dice and a maximum of 4 dice in each of the six attributes. After filling the minimum requirements, players have 6 dice to spread between their six abilities. Once in play, any action which requires a roll will be associated with one of the six abilities, and the player gets to roll however many dice they allocated for that attribute. For example, hitting something with a blaster requires the ability to aim the blaster accurately, so you would roll your dexterity. If you went ahead and maxed out your dexterity, then you’d be able to roll 4d6 against your opponent’s dodge. And if he or she rolls lower than you did, the blaster bolt hits! And given how dangerous combat is treated in this game, there’s a good chance getting hit by that blaster bolt killed them.
There’s also a skills system for more specific tasks. Each character starts out with 7 dice to apply to skills. So even though you have 4 dice in dexterity, you could put another 2 dice in the Blasters skill, and be able to roll a whopping 6 dice whenever you try to hit somebody. Dice can also be split up. Each die counts as 3 “pips,” which is WEG’s code for bonuses. Essentially, if you’ve put 2 skill die into blasters, 3 into medicine, and 1 into starfighter piloting, and can’t decide where to put your last die, you can just break it up. Add a +2 to starfighter piloting (making the skill 1d6 + 2) and a +1 to blasters.

The system is elegant, and beautiful. Despite using what is essentially a point-buy system, it doesn’t feel bogged down with number crunching, nor do you ever feel obligated to build an “optimized” character.

This has been a weird post. When I started it, my intention was to examine all of these different game systems, and figure out how their use of ability scores could be adapted to the game I’ve been working on. Instead, I’ve really just listed all the different systems I found next to one another, with some commentary attached.

This might be a bad post…but it doesn’t seem bad to me right now, at 1 in the morning. Maybe I’ll feel differently later, but I’ll let you be the judge.

I Concede: OD&D Initiative is Superior

The other night, I participated in my very first OD&D game, played via Google+ with Brendan as the GM. I could be wrong, but I think Brendan may be only the second person to GM for me. He’s good, and the game went exceptionally well. One of the other players has already written a pretty thorough recap of the game, so I won’t go into too much detail. Suffice to say that I have thus far made a good account of myself, considering that I’m easy to hit, have only 1 HP, and can prepare only a single spell per day. Instead, I’d like to focus on system analysis, specifically with regards to initiative.

In Pathfinder, initiative is mechanically simple. At the start of combat, following any surprise round, each participant in the combat rolls a twenty sided die. They then add their dexterity modifier to the number they rolled, and each of the battle’s participants are ranked. They then begin taking turns in descending order of initiative. There are ways to gain an additional boost, or a penalty, to your initiative, but that’s the system in a nutshell. The mechanic is quite simple.

In OD&D, initiative is handled en masse. The battle’s participants are divided into groups (usually consisting of “the players” and “the stuff which wants to hurt the players.”) Each ‘side’ of the encounter then rolls a single six sided die. Whoever wins the roll is allowed to take their actions first, along with everyone else on their side. Once the winner’s turn is over, the other side takes their turn. Following that, initiative is rolled again to determine which side will go first in the next round.

Amusingly, I recently encountered this rule during my ongoing perusal of the AD&D 1st edition Dungeon Master’s Guide. It was featured in Part 6 of that series, and at the time I was not impressed. To be specific, I wrote:

There seems to be an excessive amount of computation involved in determining the order of combat.

A comment which I now find rather ironic.

The problem is that while Pathfinder’s initiative mechanic is simple, it is not elegant. When my entire game group is all able to get together, I’ve got six players. Even the simplest encounter must include at least one foe for them to face, so that’s a total of seven initiatives to track at a minimum. When I ask for an initiative roll, I need to quickly write down the names and numbers of each person. This is often an awkward task, since I can’t write even simple initials as fast as my players are able to recite their initiative scores to me, and at some point I need to roll and record the initiative for the bad guys as well. Going through this arduous process isn’t just annoying for me, it’s damaging to the player’s experience as well. Deciding to fight an enemy is an exciting moment in gameplay, but when the group spends 30-60 seconds rolling and recording initiative, some of that excitement is drained.

That’s not even the end of it, because once initiative in Pathfinder has been recorded, it must betracked.Since it’s impossible to have the initiative order written down linearly (unless you want to re-write it after initially recording it, thus wasting more time) you need to bounce around on your list and do your best not to skip anybody. The best method I’ve come up with is to quickly draw a “bouncing line” between names on the list. But even this is a pretty hit-and-miss technique.

Comedic overstatement aside, these complaints are not what I would call game-breaking. Until recently, I would have even called them necessary evils. Evils which, frustrating as they may be, are minor in comparison with the benefits the system provides. Using Pathfinder’s initiative, players and player foes get mixed together in the combat order, creating an interesting and chaotic effect for battle. Additionally, it allows for individual characters to be particularly good, or particularly bad, at leaping into a fight. Rogues can move in quickly to attack before their foes are prepared, while a character who used dexterity as a dump stat is forced to deal with the consequences of that choice. Plus, it adds structure to the tactical combat, and I like tactical combat. There’s a lot of good to be said about how the system works.

By comparison, OD&D’s initiative mechanic sounds not only chaotic, but intrusive. At least with Pathfinder, order is determined at the start of combat, after which it only need to be referenced. Plus, when rolling as a group, how does one determine who in the group goes first? It all sounds pretty sketchy in theory.

In practice, however, OD&D’s initiative is simple, and surprisingly intuitive. Who goes first when the player group has initiative? Well…whoever feels like going first, that’s who. I can see how that question might pose a problem if you were running a game for children, but we’re all adults. We’ve stood in lines, waited at traffic lights, and given our bus seats to old ladies. We know how to be gracious, particularly when it doesn’t really matter who goes first. In function, the person who went first was whoever had an idea they were excited to try out. It even turned out to be a large benefit, since one of our players had never played the game before. He was able to wait until last during each round until he gained some confidence in how the game was played.

And since rolling for initiative is so simple, (a single opposed D6 roll, no modifiers), re-rolling it each round didn’t intrude on gameplay at all. If anything, it enhanced the excitement of combat. Remember above how I mentioned that Pathfinder’s initiative allows friends and foes to be mixed in the combat order, which makes things a little chaotic and exciting? That effect is enhanced when either you or your enemies might be able to take two turns in a row!

The system isn’t flawless. For example, I’m pretty sure there was a round or two where a PCs took an extra action than they should have, or no action at all. And as an avid player of rogues, I would be pretty disappointed to permanently shift to a system where I couldn’t jump the initiative order by a significant margin. But these are minor complaints. The bottom line is that OD&D’s initiative mechanic is better than Pathfinder’s. As such, I propose the following amendment to Pathfinder’s rules:

Initiative: At the start of combat, separate each of the battle’s participants into groups based on affiliation. (Most battles will be between two groups, but some battles may be between three or more). The member of each group who has the highest initiative modifier rolls 1d20 and adds their initiative modifier. The members of the group which rolled highest take their actions first, followed by the other groups in descending order of initiative.

Once everyone has taken a turn, initiative is re-rolled, again by the group member with the highest initiative modifier. The process repeats itself until combat has concluded.

I considered adding a few other mechanics in there, such as players with the Improved Initiative feat being moved into a separate group, or an incremental decrease in initiative bonuses as the combat goes on. But I think stuff like that would just complicate an otherwise simple mechanic, without adding anything of value to it. Though I might later amend the rule so that initiative bonuses only count during the first round.

I think this should serve as a good compromise between the two systems, and look forward to using it. Though I doubt I’ll be springing it on my current group just yet. I think they get a little confused by my constant re-tooling of the game’s mechanics.

What I Want

I like Pathfinder, which is why I’ve always been a vocal critic of it. It has a lot of problems; in many ways it falls short of my ideal game. I’ve often tried to improve upon the flaws with house rules, and I’ve been open in discussing the flaws which can’t be fixed. Over the past few months I’ve read through a number of other RPGs as well. Aside from my well documented perusal of the original Dungeon Master’s Guide, I’ve been looking at various retro clones created by the OSR community, some modern Pathfinder alternatives, and some games in completely different genres. More and more I think that I won’t be happy until I produce my own sourcebook.

It’s not something I think I’ll be doing anytime too soon. I don’t think I’m ready for that kind of massive and involved project yet. But thinking about how I would design a game has got me thinking about what I want in a game. So I’ve compiled a list. And, since this list undoubtedly says a lot about this blog’s perspective, it seems useful to share.

I want rules which can be memorized. This doesn’t mean they need to be short enough that I can learn them by rote, it just means that they need to be logical enough that I can quickly deduce any I forget. If I need to spend a few sessions looking things up after we play, that’s okay.

I want rules which don’t try to establish mechanics for every possible action players might take. Instead, I want rules which guide me in coming up with my own mechanics for those situations, and which help me make those rulings without unbalancing my game.

I want more rules directed towards the GM than the players. There should certainly be rules that players can learn, but none or very few which they feel forced to learn. Nothing dissolves a budding player’s enthusiasm faster than telling them they need to buy a $60 rulebook, and read 300 pages of it before they’ll know how to play.

I want more supplements geared towards GMs than players. I understand why this hasn’t been the case in recent years: for every GM, there are probably three or more players. And since GMs will buy books anyway, it’s obvious which type of book has more potential customers. But never forget that the GM is your best salesperson. I can think of eleven people off of the top of my head who would probably have never picked up a tabletop RPG if I hadn’t invited them to my games. None of them bought supplements, but a lot of them bought core books and dice.

I want characters that can be created quickly. I don’t want to feel as though I’m sentencing players to waste eons every time I kill their characters. And I don’t want to force new players to sit through a bunch of obtuse character creation nonsense before I have a chance to show them how fun the game can be.

I want characters that can be customized and specialized endlessly. Character class is a fine starting point, but if my players want to make choices then I want to be able to offer them. If a player sets a goal for something they would like their character to be capable of, I want that goal to be achievable.

I want deep, tactical combat which forces players to think beyond a mundane exchange of blows. Combat where making a plan and knowing how to work together can mean the difference between life and death. Combat which none the less encourages players to take risks. Combat where being clever about your environment can turn the tide of a losing fight. Combat which is fun every time.

I want combat that doesn’t need to take an hour.

I want mechanics that engage players beyond a die roll. Rolling dice is a great way to resolve some types of action–but not ALL types of action. If every problem is solved with a die roll, then we might as be playing around a craps table.

I want mechanics unburdened by vestigial adherence to tradition. Just because past games have always done things a certain way doesn’t mean modern games should. The past exists for us to learn from, not to mindlessly emulate.

I want a game which doesn’t ignore history. If Gary Gygax or Dave Arneson figured out how to handle a situation amazingly, there’s no reason modern games should simply handle the same situation passably.

I want a game that equally supports many modes of play. A game which is just as engaging in tasks such as exploration or political intrigue, as it is in combat.

I want a game which explains not just the rules of the system, but the spirit which those rules support. One which explains why rules exist, and how certain mechanics improve play. I want a game which helps Game Masters make the leap from learning rules, to running a campaign.

I want a game which is supported by online tools, but which recognizes that if a game relies on online tools, it is a weak game.

I want rules that don’t need to be bypassed because they pointlessly add unnecessary work.

I want a game where the rules are designed to support me, not a game where the rules waste my time and frustrate my players.

I want a game without ‘traps,’ intended to impede a character’s build. Honestly, I want a game which doesn’t support even the concept of a ‘build,’ but instead promotes mechanical customization.

Dissection of Pathfinder's Monster Entries

One of the frequent criticisms of Dungeons and Dragons 3.0 is that it made monsters too complicated. It’s a criticism which D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder both inherited, and its one that I’ve offered some defense against in the past. However, having created several monsters of my own by now, I find that my resolve in this matter is weakening. When I’m preparing for a game, and I need unique monsters, I don’t employ an elaborate series of rules for constructing the statblock. I take my concept, write down any information which I think will be relevant to play, and that’s that. The whole process takes 5 minutes. Maybe 15 if the monster is particularly complicated, or I’m being fiddly with the mechanics.

The only time I’ve ever actually followed the rules for creating monsters is when I was preparing that monster to be posted on Papers & Pencils. That’s a total of four times in my entire GMing career: The Corpse Sewn Hekatonkheires, the Bloody Avenger, the Draugr, and the three spiders I ganked from Telecanter. Every time it was a pain in the ass which lasted at least an hour, more often two. And what, precisely do I have to show for it? Do those monsters I created according to the official rules function more elegantly? Are they balanced better? Would players even notice a difference between a creature created in 15 minutes, and one created in two hours using the official rules?

No.

If the answer to any of the above questions was ‘yes,’ would it justify the extra time investment?

No.

Functionally, there’s very little difference between a monster I quickly jot down, and a monster I laboriously construct using the rules. Aside from the “statistics” block of information, all the same stuff is there. What else could you even conceivably remove? In combat you need to know a creature’s defenses and offenses. Ecology might not be strictly necessary, but it has a lot of value to GMs, and takes no real time to create. The reason the official monster creation method wastes so much time is not because of the volume of information it creates, it’s because of the ridiculously precise methodology it calls for. Every monster needs to have a certain amount of HD, and based on that can have a certain number of feats and skills.The monster’s statistics, HP, AC, saving throws, attack and damage rolls, all of it needs to be cross referenced with the desired CR of the creature, and anything that is raised requires something else to be lowered in response.

Ostensibly, the hope is that all of this will help GMs predict the how challenging a monster will be. Once the process is complete, you should theoretically be able to calculate a monster’s Challenge Rating, and know what level of adventurer it is appropriate for. Following the rules will ensure you don’t create a monster so overpowered that your players get murdered, and you won’t create a monster so underpowered that your players get bored.

For the moment, I’m going to set aside the question of whether or not a GM should even try to create “appropriate” challenges. For myself, I prefer that my players learn to run away now and again. If they never face a battle which is beyond them, then they’ll never be forced to look beyond combat for solutions. However, I can understand and appreciate the desire to have some kind of measuring stick for the level of challenge an encounter will present.

The problem is that after all the work this system puts us through to ‘calculate’ a monster’s challenge rating, it doesn’t even work. It doesn’t work because there’s no meaningful way to take a monster’s Special Abilities and Qualities into account when you’re trying to calculate CR. There’s not even a quarter of a page in the “Monster Creation” section of the bestiary devoted to the topic, and it’s the most important one. Pick up your bestiary, flip to any monster in the book. If that monster has a CR higher than 1, a guarantee you that the most important part of the statblock is the special abilities. Of course it is! If not for special abilities, then a monster is nothing more than a pile of calculations about how hard the monster hits, and how hard it is to kill. If monsters didn’t have special abilities, then there would hardly be any point to having a Bestiary at all.

I am not making the argument that Pathfinder needs a better system for determining how special abilities influence a monster’s CR. Special abilities often bend the rules, or create entirely new mechanics. They are far too varied for any system to properly take them into account, and any system which tried would be even more complicated than the one Pathfinder already uses. The argument I am making is that the official monster creation rules don’t even succeed at the one task they’re supposedly good for: accurately estimating a monster’s CR. And even if they were, it still wouldn’t be worth the time.

Then there’s the “statistics” block. Here you’ll find information on the monster’s six base abilities, it’s base attack bonus, it’s CMB and CMD, the feats it has, the skills it has along with any racial modifiers, and the languages it speaks. I confess that I find most of this to be at least marginally useful. Certainly it is essential to know the combat maneuver scores of anything the players might fight. And even if I don’t need to know the bonus that a Couatl has to its survival check, I can accept that others do. But what is gained by meticulously calculating how many skill points each of these creatures receives per hit die? Is it imperative that each monster can be reverse engineered, just so others can have the satisfaction of discovering that there was indeed an internal logic at play? I remember that after I had finished with the Corpse Sewn Hekatonkheires, I realized that I had forgotten to add feats. I then felt forced to search for ways to empower a monster which I knew was already powerful enough to suit my needs.

So what’s the solution? To be frank, I don’t have one right now. As I mentioned above, I see the value in challenge rating. It provides a measuring stick, and its never bad for a GM to have a fuller understanding of how something will impact their game. But I don’t think that measuring stick is worth the eternity required to achieve even the most uncertain result. For now, I’ll resign myself to making estimates about a creature’s abilities. Perhaps at some point in the future I’ll come up with and post a new system. But, for now, I think it’s simply important to acknowledge that the current system is bad. It is broken, and should not be used.

The Wide-Swing Dilemma

My party’s cleric wields a large, two-handed warhammer. It’s not a weapon which appears in any of the Pathfinder books I’ve read, but I include it in my games as a piece of standard equipment because they are awesome. In our last game session, the party was ambushed by a number of animated goblin skeletons while they were exploring the base of a giant statue. As monsters go, skeletons are not particularly deadly. But they were numerous, and none of the players had ever encountered a creature with damage reduction before. The party’s ranger was none too pleased when his arrow simply clattered through the undead’s ribcage without dealing damage.

Once I explained how damage reduction worked to my party, they figured out that the cleric’s warhammer, as a bludgeoning weapon, was able to overcome this defense. The barbarian cleverly responded by finding the largest rock she could, hefting it, and waddling around the battlefield smashing skeletons to pieces. The rogue and ranger did the best they could, but found that their piecing and slashing weapons weren’t up to the task. They encouraged the cleric to take the forefront in the battle, since her weapon was ideally suited to the fight. She did, and eventually ended up in this position:

I know, my battlemat is out of scale with the miniature base. I need to do something about that eventually.

Anyway, when the player found herself in this position, she told me she wanted to try and attack all three of the skeletal goblins in a single horizontal swing. I couldn’t think of a single diegetic reason why she wouldn’t be able to attempt this. I made a quick ruling at the table, and told her that she would be able to attempt it as a full action, but that each attack would be made at a cumulative -2 penalty. So her attack on the first goblin in her arc would be at a -2 penalty, the center goblin would be at a -4 penalty, and the final goblin would be attacked at a -6 penalty. This seemed like a reasonable penalty to me, and I had the player roll her attack dice.

As it turned out, none of her attacks landed, nor did any of her attacks land on her next turn when she tried the same tactic again. The penalties didn’t even come into play, she never rolled above a 10. Bad luck, but the party prevailed, and continued on with their adventure. But the encounter stuck with me throughout the rest of the evening, and I’ve continued to ponder it ever since. My ruling ‘steps on the toes’ of two mechanics built into the Pathfinder game: multiple attacks from a high base attack bonus, and Cleave/Great Cleave feats.

If you’ve played Pathfinder, or D&D 3.x, you’re familiar with these rules. Each class has a base attack bonus which rises as the character goes up in level, and this bonus is added to most types of physical attack that the character will make. Once the creature’s BAB gets high enough, they gain secondary, tertiary, and even quaternary bonuses which are lower (-5, -10, and -15 lower) than their full BAB. As a full action, the character can make multiple attacks per round using progressively lower bonuses. But while a character must be at least level 11 to gain three attacks with their BAB, my table ruling allowed a 2nd level character to attempt three attacks. And she did it at a -2, -4, -6 penalty, rather than a -0, -5, -10 penalty. A net bonus over the official way of doing things.

Gaining iterative attacks from base attack bonus does have a few benefits which I would not have allowed the cleric, had she asked. For example, a character attempting multiple attacks using their BAB is allowed to choose the order in which they attack their foes, can take a 5ft step in between attacks, and can even decide whether or not they want to continue attacking, or take a move action instead, after the first of their attacks. None of these should be possible if all of the attacks are made in a single fluid motion. But nor would they seem to make up for the fact that my cleric was able to access an ability which (according to the rules) was far beyond her ability.

The second rule I stepped on the toes of, the cleave and greater cleave feats, serve a similar function. If a character with the cleave feat successfully deals damage to one foe, then that character may make a second attack (at their full BAB) against another adjacent enemy. The greater cleave feat works the same way, it simply allows the player to continue making new attacks against adjacent enemies so long as the chain of successful attacks remains unbroken. Both feats subject the player to a -2 AC penalty for a round after use.

My player did not have the benefit of being able to use her full BAB on each attack, as the cleave feat allows players to do. But she also did not suffer a -2 penalty to AC, nor did she need to successfully deal damage to the first enemy in order to attack the second, or the third. And, on top of that, she didn’t need to take 3 feats (Power Attack > Cleave > Great Cleave) to make the attempt in the first place. Once again, it seems that my table ruling gave the player more a net bonus over the official rules.

Despite my ruling interfering with two official rules, I can’t help but feel that I acted correctly. I still cannot see a single diegetic reason why Gibbous the cleric would not be able to attack all three of the closing skeletons with a single horizontal swing. And while I’m sure the rules could be debated forever, I don’t particularly care. Combat balance is not sacrosanct. Player Agency is.

None the less, I am left with a few thoughts on how to improve my game in the future.

If a player attempts this tactic again, I think they should take a -2 penalty to AC for being off balance. I think it makes a lot of sense that a player who attempts a really wild attack wouldn’t be able to block attacks as effectively.
If a player attempts this tactic again, a slightly more harsh penalty might be appropriate. A -3 cumulative penalty, instead of a -2, should be sufficient.
Players with high base attack bonuses can make iterative attacks as a standard action, rather than a full action. This is a house rule that my twitter friend Rilgon first pointed out to me, and I’ve thought it sounded like a good idea for awhile now.
I long ago abolished the Power Attack feat from my games, because it falls prey to my problem with feats. I now think I’ll remove the Cleave feat for the same reason. Great Cleave can remain, as a means of allowing players to overcome the cumulative attack penalty, but only if they hit each time. After that the penalty stacks for each attack they miss.

I’m curious how other GMs would have handled this situation. Personally, it’s just edged me closer to the day when I build my own tabletop role playing system, with blackjack and hookers.

Board Game: Expedition to Castle Ravenloft

Ravenloft, both the adventure, and the setting which surrounds it, have always fascinated me. Partially because of my well known love for the macabre, but also because everything about them has a kind of mystique which I find enthralling. The dangers of Ravenloft are always unseen, always shifting, and you never know where you’re going to end up. And Castle Ravenloft itself stands as a figurative edifice among dungeons. My mind’s eye imagines an endless maze of corridors, filled with every kind of danger imaginable. And at the end there is Strahd, a villain so legendary that he’s withstood almost 30 years of marketing and re-marketing without becoming boring.

At least, that’s my view, as someone whose never been so fortunate as to venture into Castle Ravenloft himself.

When I first saw that Wizards of the Coast had created an Expedition to Castle Ravenloft boardgame, it piqued my curiosity. And when my gaming group recently began experimenting with board games (we all very much enjoyed Hero Quest) I took that as an excuse to spend $60 on the game, so the group could have some variety. Last night was the first time we played the game as a group, and we ran through three adventures before calling it an evening.

The game is quite clearly based on 4th edition rules, which I personally found a little off putting, as I have a strong aversion to that ruleset. But even though it uses the terminology of 4th edition (daily/utility/at-will powers, dragonborn, elradin, etc.)the board game is none the less a fully self-contained product. And while my personal feelings made me a little uncomfortable talking about “healing surges” at the table, they function perfectly well as a mechanic for the board game. Even if I do not approve of their use in a tabletop RPG.

The basic premise of the game is very simple. Each player selects a character from the five which are included with the game. The characters all have a race and class, which determine which stack of ability cards they recieve. The players then take four abilities which they’d like to have access to during the game, plus one ability which is fixed and must be taken every time. The environment is created using a stack of dungon tiles with interlocking edges, which are shuffled and placed face down on the table. Whenever a player explores the “edge” of a tile currently in play, they take a new tile off the stack and connect it to the game board. When a monster is encountered, the player who encounters it draws a monster card, and at the end of their turn each round they must play the monster according to the tactics listed on the card. Each game session consists of braving the dangers of Castle Ravenloft to complete a specific objective, which you select from the adventure booklet before play begins.

The game is actually quite difficult. Groups who wander into the dungeon without understanding their own abilities probably will not walk out again. It also helps to have a thorough understanding of the game’s rules; during my playtesting session prior to getting the whole group together I nearly flipped the table because I didn’t realize I was supposed to be picking up treasure cards every time I killed a monster.

Most of the game’s difficulty comes from its manic pace. If a player does not explore any new dungeon tiles during their turn, they must draw an encounter card. Some cards summon traps or monsters, while other cards are spell effects which can damage or immobilize you. The worse encounter cards, however, are those with environment effects which remain in play until replaced by a new environment effect. Most of these effects are a severe hinderance to the party. Some cause damage when a player uses an item, or a once-daily ability. Perhaps the worst environment effect is the one which damages a player if they end their turn on the same tile as any other players, essentially forcing the party to split up.

The only way to avoid drawing an encounter card is to explore a new part of the dungeon, and when you do that you must place a new monster on the newly explored tile. So no matter what, each character’s turn creates a new complication for the party. Plus, some tiles have black triangles on them, indicating that you must draw an encounter card anyway! I must acknowledge the elegance of the design. Since the number of dangers encountered rises with the number of players, the game automatically scales up and down for whatever number of players you have at the table.

Not everything about the game’s design is quite so elegant, unfortunately. My group quickly implemented a number of house rules to combat some of the game’s ridiculousness. For example, we combined the “Hero” and “Exploration” phases of each player’s turn. In the basic rules, players must first do all of their moving and attacking, and only then can they choose whether or not they will add a new tile to the board. That means that if you begin your turn by moving to a tile’s edge, and exploring, then you cannot attack the monster which appears there until your next turn. Apparently every monster in the dungeon has the element of surprise.

We also changed the rules for leveling up. According to the manual, once a player has collected 5xp worth of monsters, then the next time they roll a 20, they may discard those experience points, and flip their character sheet over to the “level 2” side. This is a nuisance kind of rule. In both session of the game where we followed that rule, it ends up with every player sitting on 10 or 15 experience points, waiting for a fucking twenty to come up. Instead, we allow each player to level up immediately upon reaching 5xp.

We’ve changed a few other minor rules here and there, but those are the two largest changes I think.

I am intrigued by the possibilities for expanding this game. It only comes with a handful of adventures, but there’s no reason that we couldn’t come up with our own adventures for the game ad-infinitum. And that’s not even to mention its sister games. Expedition to Castle Ravenloft uses the exact same system for play as two other D&D Board Games: Legends of Drizzt, and Caverns of Ashardalon. The games could easily be mixed together to add a larger variety of monsters, treasure, encounters, and adventurers.

As a final point, I have to mention the miniatures. As a GM, I refuse to use miniatures for anything but PCs. But, for those who do like to have more ornate monster representations on the battlefield, the minis included with this game will be a significant bonus. They’re very nicely creafted plastic, and come from the same molds that official D&D miniatures have come from in the past. And there’s so many of them! Enough, I think, for every monster card in the game to be in-play simultaneously.

Without question, Expedition to Castle Ravenloft is worth the remarkably cheap $65 price tag. Any criticism I have for the game is minor, and the amount of fun I’ve already gotten out of it in just a few weeks is impressive. Plus, even if you don’t like the game, your purchase won’t be a total loss, because you’ll have miniatures to play with.

Overview of Pathfinder's Skills: Conclusion

As a GM, I’ve always gravitated towards using some skills, and away from using others. In my limited experience, I’ve found that most GMs do something similar. There are skill checks which they call for, and checks which they don’t. Beneficial as those decisions may be, players are often harmed by this practice. Because, in my experience, GMs don’t communicate which skills they will be using for and which they will not. They may not have even noticed that they ignore certain skills. In my own experience, when a player says “I swim into the river,” I’ve never even considered asking for a swim check. I’ve always simply allowed players to do so. But what I’ve come to realize is that I have been, in effect, lying to my players because of that.

When a new player is joining my games, I’ve never told them not to put any ranks in swim, or climb, or disguise, or escape artist. I let them make their own decisions, not realizing that in doing so I am implying that any skill they put points into is a skill which will potentially be useful to them. How many of my players have wasted skill points on skills which would never be rolled even a single time? I have been at fault in this, which is why I set out to correct that oversight with this series. Over two weeks of posts here on Papers & Pencils have been devoted to overviewing Pathfinder’s skills. I’ve approached each one in turn with as clear a mind as I could manage, analyzing its strengths and its flaws in the hopes of cutting the fat from the system.

What has been the result? Well, the original game of Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 had an amusingly appropriate 35 skills. Pathfinder combined a number of these skills together, bringing the total number of skills down to 26. With the additional cuts I’ve made, the total number of skills is down to 14 total.You can see the breakdown of the skills on this chart:

My reduction in the number of skills is pretty drastic. It is legitimate to be concerned that it may be too drastic. If a human rogue rolls 18 for their intelligence, then they can add two to that, and start the game with an Intelligence modifier of +5. If that character also selects rogue as their favored class, then at each level they can receive a total of 15 skill points (Rogue is 8 + Intelligence Modifier, +1 for the human racial trait, +1 for leveling in a character’s favored class.) Considering that both Craft and Knowledge represent multiple skills, this doesn’t mean that the character would end up with excess skill points at each level. However, such a rogue would almost certainly be forced to put skill points into a number of abilities they had little to no interest in actually using. Such a character does not even imply any attempt to manipulate the system on the player’s part. All it would require is a lucky roll for ability scores, followed by common-sense choices.We could reduce the number of skill points each class receives. However, for now, I will be allowing characters to maintain their current speed of skill point acquisition, to see if this is actually a problem or not. After all, no class gains skill at the same pace that the rogue does, and rogues are supposed to have a wide variety of talents.

I hope I have been somewhat successful in streamlining, and improving Pathfinder’s skill system with these posts. But there’s only so much that can be done. The D20 system’s skill mechanic is fundamentally flawed, and from what I’ve seen, so is the way design decisions have been made. If not by Paizo, then at least by Wizards of the Coast.

First, there’s the issue of linear probability. Rolling a single twenty sided die for a skill check means that none of the potential results are even slightly more likely than any other possible result. A character can roll a 1, or a 20, or anything in between with equal probability. With some rolls, like attack rolls in combat, it makes good sense. Combat is chaotic, and unpredictable. Your skill at thrusting a sword is mitigated by the quality of your opponent’s armor, and their skill at parrying, or blocking, or dodging your attack. This is not true with something like a ride check or a acrobatics check. Take the instance of a jump: in Pathfinder, a level 1 commoner who attempts to jump as far as she can is just as likely to make it 1ft as she is to make it 20ft. Can you imagine anyone in the world with that kind of variance in their ability? A much better system would be one which used multiple dice for skill checks. Something like 2d10, or 3d6, which would have a bell curve of probability, where the numbers in the middle of the possible range (right around 10-11) will appear much more frequently than the numbers at either extreme of the number range.

I’ve also found that there has apparently been no real attempt to balance the skill’s usefulness against one another. It would seem to me as though any sufficient amount of play testing would reveal that skills such as escape artist are used much less frequently (and to much less effect) than skills such as perception or acrobatics. Given this wide disparity in the frequency and effectiveness of usage, a skill point put into escape artist is significantly less valuable to a player than a point spent in acrobatics. Now, I would not suggest that each skill needs to be precisely equal in value to every other skill. A game which offers as many choices for character building as Pathfinder does will always have more and less ideal ‘builds.’ But there is a limit to the disparity of balance which is acceptable. Some of Pathfinder’s core skills are more valuable than others by an order of magnitude, and that’s unacceptable.

For many of these skills, I can only imagine that they were kept in the game because the game needed to be compatible with D&D 3.5 products.

I would like to thank all of my readers who stuck with this series throughout. I know it has been a rather dry read. Truth be told, I’ve been itching to be done writing it myself. There have been a number of topics I’ve been greatly interested in writing about, but I did not want to interrupt the flow of these skill posts. Now that they’re done, I look forward to covering a variety of topics which have been on my mind these past few weeks. As mentioned earlier in this series, I am intending to re-write the Knowledge and Craft skills, as well as the process of identifying magic items. You can expect those posts in the coming weeks, but not before I’ve had some time to touch on some other subjects first.

Overview of Pathfinder's Skills: Stealth to Use Magic Device

Stealth (Full Description on PFSRD)(-C’s Post): The stealth skill is not quite so broken as I thought it was before I sat down to do my analysis. It can be easy for those of us who played Dungeons and Dragons 3rd edition for years to not notice, or forget, some of the changes which Pathfinder has made. Pathfinder’s stealth skill doesn’t include any information on hiding whatsoever: hiding is left up to the GM and players to work out on their own. Which is good and proper. If my players tell me they would like to hide behind a statue, then I see no reason to make them roll for it. Simply using commonsense rules about line of sight is enough. Though I would appreciate it if the stealth skill included information about hiding in shadows, or using camouflage in the woods.

In my games, I assume that all characters standing in darkness and not moving are effectively hidden and cannot be perceived unless a creature has darkvision. Moving half your speed in darkness requires a stealth check (for moving silently) made with a +4 bonus. Characters standing in dim light make stealth checks directly opposed to perception checks so long as they are not moving. If they do move, they make their check at a -4 penalty. In areas of normal or bright light, hiding in shadows is done at a -2 penalty when standing still, and a -6 penalty when moving.

I also use facing in my games, as presented under the OGL for D&D 3.5. Note that the rules include a -5 penalty for perception checks made to the “flanking” (left and right) areas, and -10 penalty for perception checks made towards the “rear” area. So characters standing to the side or the rear of a creature can attempt to use stealth checks to move silently into an area where they can hide, which allows them to hide during combat.

Judgement: As written, the skill is not clear on several key points. And, without facing, the skill’s use in combat becomes a little ridiculous. By polishing these aspects of the skill, it can be made acceptable.

Survival (Full Description on PFSRD)(-C’s Post): I like survival. When attempting to subsist in the wilderness, there are some tasks which shouldn’t be ignored, but which are none the less not interesting or easy enough to actually model at the table. Finding food and water, for example. While this may be a simple task in a forest, scrounging up the necessities of life might be significantly more difficult on a rocky mountain, or in a desert, or a poison-filled swamp. The skill also helps players avoid becoming lost, which is good when world travel is handled by a hex crawl rather than the much less entertaining “fade to black” style travel. The skill is also essential when attempting to find, and follow tracks, which is a time honored ability in D&D, and functions effectively under the Pathfinder rules.

Judgement: I would like it if this skill had more utility, but some of the utility it already has (determining weather a day in advance, for example) is pretty useless. A better mechanic for these tasks could probably be worked out for future editions of the game, but as it stands survival is adequate.

Swim (Full Description on PFSRD)(-C’s Post): If you read my entry on climb, then you already know why I hate the swim skill. It is utterly without merit for a game which takes place largely on land to treat the ability to swim as anything more than a binary function. Either yes, a character can swim, or no, they cannot swim. I suppose that if a specific adventure called for the characters to spend significant amounts of time in the water, then a “water maneuverability classes” similar to the ones traditionally used to gauge flight ability might be useful. But that’s about it.

The rules offer a number of examples of when a swim check should be asked for, such as when the water is rough, or stormy. But how often is this really an issue? In all my years, I’ve only ever played through a single underwater dungeon, and a handful of water-environment combats. Even in those instances, I never felt the need to roll dice to determine how well players could move. I understand, of course, that my personal experience can’t be extrapolated to everyone who plays the game. But the game is clearly not designed around adventuring through watery environments, and if it was, I doubt you would need to roll dice to determine whether or not you could move at all.

In my games I allow players to simply swim if they feel as though it’s an ability their character would have. If you need a mechanic, then have players who wish to swim spend a single skill point to gain the ability to do so. It makes more sense than learning languages by spending a single skill point.

Judgement: Purge this skill from your game, and let its name never be spoken again.

Use Magic Device (Full Description on PFSRD)(-C’s Post): This is another example of a well constructed skill, like Sleight of Hand. It allows any character to use items, such as wands and scrolls, which would typically only be usable by casters. This allows characters greater flexibility in their planning. My players, and myself when I am a player, often come up with elaborate plans which require the use of a specific spell cast in a specific place at a specific time, where there might be no caster present. But since a fighter is not fully capable of understanding the complexities of a scroll of fireball, it’s only logical for there to be a chance for failure.

Judgement: Keep this skill in the game as-is.

And there you have it. All of the skills. The conclusion will go up over the Weekend, after which we will return to our regularly scheduled writings.