I like the idea of minions which require two hits to kill, but it sacrifices a major strength of the minion concept: that the DM literally has to track nothing as far as hit points go for them.

So here’s an idea for 2-hit minions.

1. A standing minion which is hit is knocked prone and its miniature tipped over.
2. A prone minion is considered bloodied.
3. A prone minion which is hit is killed.

On their turn, the minions may stand up as usual. Alternatively, if you don’t mind giving up the easy tracking of prone status, you could tip minions to show that they’re bloodied. I kinda like it like this, though; adds a bit of a sense of urgency, since the PCs have to try to kill them before they get their turn.

Fantasy Flight Games recently published the third edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, and it’s perhaps the most innovative roleplaying game I’ve ever seen (note that I qualify that statement; there are plenty of RPGs out there I haven’t seen, and I’m sure some could give WHFRP3e a run for its money).

Unfortunately, the steep price tag can be rather off putting. All I can say is that if you get the opportunity, you owe it yourself to at least give the game a look.

Anyways, enough with all that fluff. Here are the things I find really innovative.

Presentation

The first thing you will notice about this RPG is that it does not look like an RPG. Sitting on the shelf at your FLGS, it probably bears a much greater resemblance to a board game and, indeed, its publisher Fantasy Flight Games is known for some of the best production values in the board game industry.

Inside, the box, you’ll find four full-color, absolutely gorgeous manuals; a bunch of colorful, custom dice; many, many decks of cards, both large and small; several sheets of cardboard counters needing to be punched out; figure standees which serve as pseudo-minis; cardstock sheets representing each career (read: class) in the game; three boxes for players to store their characters’ stuff in; and a pad of lovely, full-color character sheets.

Frankly, when you look at everything, it’s just really, really cool.

Dice

The dice system used in this game is a dice pool system reminiscent of Descent. In a nutshell, there are a variety of different custom dice which can be broadly categorized as either “good” or “bad.” Whenever you take an action, you’ll have a standard dice pool which you assemble and then add in other dice to represent different factors. If you’re using a weapon you’re specialized in, for example, you’d add a good die, or if you were fighting in the dark you’d add some number of bad dice.

The really innovative thing here is all of those add ins. In D&D, there’s a concept known by some as “The DM’s Best Friend.” In a nutshell, the DM’s best friend here is a +2 bonus; whenever a player does something cool and you don’t know how else to reward them, a good fallback is to give them a +2 bonus on whichever roll they might be making.

WHFRP3e has its own version of the DM’s Best Friend– the Fortune Die. Fortune dice are “good” dice, and can only help a character or at worst do nothing. Whenever anything’s going in the PC’s favor, the GM might toss a fortune die into the character’s dice pool. Fundamentally, I don’t know how different this really is from a +2 bonus on a d20 roll, but it just feels like there’s something so much more tangible and real here.

And, of course, there’s also the flipside to that, the Misfortune Die. The Misfortune Die, as particularly clever readers might guess, is the evil twin brother of the Fortune Die. If a player wants to try something which is foolish or ill-advised, the GM can use these as a penalty.

The really nice thing about all of this is that it completely obviates the need for any math. You just assemble your dice pool, roll them, and figure out if you got more success symbols than challenge symbols. There’s no, “Hey, did you add the +2 from my blessing spell?” At worst, you might forget a die from some source, but then it’s quick and easy to figure out if that’s the case and rectify the situation.

Stances

The stance system is one of the first things that really drew me into WHFRP3e. Using little puzzle pieces, each player assembles their own stance track which will have a neutral center and some number of red (reckless) spaces on one side and green (conservative) spaces on another.

When you’re assembling your dice pool for making a skill check, you take a number of characteristic dice based on the characteristic. For example, if you’re making a melee attack which is based on strength, and you have a 5 strength, you’d get 5 characteristic dice.

The characteristic dice are the meat and potatoes of your dice pool, and the basic, neutral one is blue. However, for each of step your character is into a reckless or conservative stance, you trade one of those blue dice for a red or green die respectively.

Red dice have multiple successes on some faces and other good things, but also have challenges and other bad things. Green dice have a relatively great number of sides with successes, but they also have delays which can slow down the recharge of your attacks.

Thus, conservative green dice help to reduce risk and are more reliable, while reckless red dice have a high-risk, high-reward feel. In this way, you can take some control over your character’s fate, and also make your roleplaying have an impact on the mechanics.

On top of this, the action cards are double-sided and each has a conservative and reckless side (which, you can probably guess without my telling you, are respectively green and red), so the same action will have different requirements or effects depending on your stance.

Party Sheet

In addition to your normal character sheet, the party itself gets a sheet which helps to give solidify and define the party. You might be a band of thugs or servants of justice, for example. The party sheet has a few very cool things.

First, every character has a number of talents, and each party sheet has two or three slots where talents can be stuck. Thus, for example, a mercenary might stick his charge talent into the Swords for Hire party sheet, and then all the players get to benefit from the charge talent.

Second, each party sheet has some special ability which may be invoked by a player or players, tied to the theme.

Third, there’s the tension meter, which is another thing that helps to give some mechanical impact to the roleplaying. Each party sheet has a meter going from 0 to somewhere in the 8-10 range. This meter measures the party’s intra-personal tension, and thus for example might increase when the party suffers a setback.

The rulebook even suggests that a GM might decide a party with an elf and a dwarf might start a few spaces along the meter, to represent the conflicts that they have. A priestess defusing a bad situation might move the meter back a space or two.

Somewhere near the middle and again at the end, the meter has two highlighted spaces which have detrimental effects when they are reached. The one at the end is usually similar to, but worse than, the one in the middle, and frequently they involve adding stress or fatigue to each of the characters. As one interesting example, the tension meter for the Band of Thugs party sheet can actually inflict wounds on characters, presumably indicating them getting into fisticuffs with one another.

Approach

Last, but certainly not least, the game just has this whole approach which feels fresh and new for an RPG. The GM book gives a lot of the standard advice that you’ve probably heard a thousand times, but it also gives you ideas to make concrete, tangible experiences.

For example, there’s a concept which is actually fairly similar to D&D4e’s skill challenges, though not quite so rigidly codified. You’d set up a progress track using the stance pieces and put some tokens on the track, representing various things. You might have a chase scene where you put two tokens representing the players and their quarry on the track. As the players find clues they’d move up the track; setbacks move their quarry along the track. If they don’t reach their quarry before he reaches the end, he escapes.

Another example; the game comes with several location cards, things like a tavern, ruins, cave, etc. You might set these on the table, and then players can put their standees on the locations they’re at. This lets the players see what’s available, or where everyone is, at a glance, and could help when you’re narrating a split party.

I’m really having a hard time codifying this point. Maybe it’s all in my head, but this game just feels different.

Downsides

The game, of course, is not perfect. Here are some of the downsides.

First and most obviously, there’s the cost. Personally, I think the cost is completely justified. You get a ton of high quality components, including four full color, glossy-paged books which I guarantee you are not cheap, even at volume prices. All that said, though, it’s still a really large initial investment that’s going to prevent a lot of people from giving it a try, and that’s a damn shame.

Relatedly, the custom dice, while awesome, are kind of annoying if you are like most (all?) gamers and expect to have your own stash of dice for your personal usage. It’s a bit annoying having to pass dice around and share from a limited supply. It’s worth noting that FFG’s got a set of dice up on their site, though it’s not yet available for purchase.

A bit more annoying of a problem is that the box seems to be designed for three players. There are really only enough materials for 3 PCs, unless you share or print out extra cards and such. I think the standard size for most gaming groups is in the 4-6 player range, meaning that most tables will need to mickey mouse a solution to this problem (or get someone with deep pockets to buy a second boxed set just for some basic action cards and boxes). I don’t want to oversell this point too much; the things in short supply would not be difficult to reproduce, nor are they absolutely essential; it would just have been nice for FFG to throw in a couple more sets of things.

Conclusion

I’m a huge fan of this. I played in the demo, and I’ll likely be running at least one campaign soon, if not two. If you get the chance to give this a try, absolutely do. It’s innovative, fresh, and fun, and most of the things that might scare you away really do enhance the roleplaying, not detract from it.

Today Encounter-a-Day’s been around for two years.

Thanks to everyone who’s supported me over this endeavor!

A while ago, someone on Twitter mentioned using shelf liner to keep dungeon tiles from sliding around. I thought I’d posted about it here, but I can’t find that post so I guess I didn’t.

For those not familiar, shelf liner is a rubber material meant to line drawers and shelves and keep things from sliding around. The beauty of it is that it’s entirely based on the high traction of the rubber, no adhesives whatsoever.

It’s also very cheap, I just picked up a 1.5′x5′ roll for $4.17 at Target, which is enough to line two sides of a foamcore board with about an inch of “gutter” on either side.

From the moment I heard the idea, I thought it was awesome, but I only just got around to picking this stuff up and it’s absolutely incredible how well it works. The dungeon tiles stick so firmly to the mat that it’s pretty much impossible to move them around without picking them up completely. It’s like they’re glued to the mat.

And the tiles stay at extreme angles. I had to hold the board up at a right angle, completely vertical, before they finally fell off, and up to that point they didn’t budge at all.

One little tip: I had a hard time finding the shelf liner, and had to actually ask someone at Target for help. Turns out it was in the cleaning supplies section, of all places.

Only three people entered the contest for the google wave invites, and I’ve just invited all of them. So congratulations to:

Kenton Henry
DeaconFrost
Guy Russel

I’ll post their entries soon.

Thanks to The Last Rogue who tweeted about this awesome D&D 4e Combat Tracker.

Some of you may know that I’ve previously endorsed Turn Wacher as my initiative tracker of choice. It’s got a lot of great features, including some things which this new program lacks, but it’s also got two major downsides: it’s not free, and it’s meant for D&D 3rd Edition.

Neither of those are particularly bad; it works just fine for 4th edition too. But I always feel like a shill when I recommend a program that’s not free.

Anyways, I’m happy to say this combat tracker is really, really good. It allows you to import custom and official monsters from the Monster Builder, and also lets you load characters from the Character Builder. You can, of course, enter them manually as well. Once you add something, it’s added to a library so it’s easy to reuse.

It’s also got a really nice interface for keeping track of conditions, automatically rolling saving throws and recharge powers, keeping track of what powers have been used, and has a display for a creature’s full stat block to boot.

I’ve finally gotten some invites for Google Wave, and have been looking forward to this opportunity to run a contest.

All you have to do to enter the contest is send me a D&D 4e monster based on a creature from Magic: The Gathering. Everyone may enter up to three times, once for each tier (Heroic, Paragon, and Epic tier). Prizes will be given out as follows:

• Best Translation: The monster which best translates the mechanics from the magic card to D&D. Preference is given to cards with interesting and unusual mechanics.
• Funniest: The monster which most amuses me.
• Heroic Door Prize: Anyone who submitted a monster in the heroic tier has a chance of winning this by random draw.
• Paragon Door Prize: Anyone who submitted a monster in the paragon tier has a chance of winning this by random draw.
• Epic Door Prize: Anyone who submitted a monster in the epic tier has a chance of winning this by random draw.
• DDI Door Prize: Anyone who submitted their monsters’ XML files from the D&D Insider Adventure Tools/Monster Builder has a chance of winning this by random draw.

Rules and Such

1. I don’t know how much of a response this will get, but to keep things sane for myself I’m limiting this to the first 100 entries, with the caveat that I reserve the right to discard entries which appear to be rushed for the sake of making it in under that deadline. I doubt there will be that much demand, though, so don’t worry too much about this. I’ll also keep you all posted if there is a surge in demand, so you’ll have warning.
2. I understand that not everyone wishes to subscribe to D&D Insider, and thus I do not require the XML files from the monsters you submit. That said, they are greatly appreciated and there’s a door prize just for submitting the XML from your monsters. So please do!
3. Please submit all of your monsters (up to 3, one for each tier) in a single email.
4. Please submit all of your monsters in plain text in the body of your email, in addition to attaching the XML files from the Monster Builder
5. Please include the name of the card which the monster is based off of, if it is not obvious, or give some other indication of its relation to Magic if the monster isn’t based directly off of a card.
6. If you have some concept that requires multiple monsters from a single tier (e.g. a group of synergistic elves), you may submit them; however, for the purposes of the contest, they will count as a single monster, giving you a single chance at the door prize. You may still submit monsters from the other tiers.
7. By submitting your monsters to me, you grant me permission to publish them with credit given to you.
8. The deadline for this contest is 11:59 PM EST, Wednesday, November 18th. If I receive an entry after the deadline, even if it was sent before the deadline and network issues delayed it, it will be disqualified.
9. Submit your entries to itoltz+wavecontest@gmail.com Don’t forget to include the name you’d like me to use when I credit you, and the email address I should use for the invitation if different than the one you’re using to send me the email.

Good luck!

Not RPG related, but I think there’s a sizable overlap between RPGers and board gamers, so…

I’m quite proud to announce my Dominion Randomizer. It’s called, cleverly enough, “Asmor’s Dominion Tool.” I know, I rock the casbah when it comes to names.

It’s optimized for use on iPhones and iPod Touches, and should work pretty well on any other device with at least a 320-pixel-wide resolution.

For those wondering what the hell Dominion is, Dominion is a really, really cool card game which recently won the SDJ (that’s Spiel des Jahres– literally translates to Game of the Year, the most prestigious award a board game can win) and is very popular with pretty much everyone who tries it. You can read more about it at Board Game Geek.

The 4e DMG2 debuted official rules for ‘companion characters,’ which are basically just monsters that work for the PCs. I’ve been doing similar things for a while, and have even used this concept as a replacement for an actual PC when I had a player (the ubiquitous tag-along-significant-other) who didn’t do well with the complexity of a full character.

Now, one problem every game has to find a way to deal with is that of absentee players. Clasically, I’ve been in the school of thought that PCs of absent players either are not present if the story permits or otherwise fade into the background– they’re technically there, but are not played in combat, don’t get any treasure/rewards, etc). In 4e in particular, PCs are just too damn complicated to ask a player to take over someone else’s.

But… a companion character is quite easy to control in addition to your normal character. It’s basically a monster, everything relevant is on a handy little sheet.

So I started thinking: what if the players, in addition to their normal character sheets, also maintained a ’stunt double’ companion character, which could be run by someone else if the player can’t make it.

So to make a stunt double, here’s what you do.

The stunt double gets the PC’s hit points, healing surge value, healing surges, defenses, and ability scores.

The stunt double also gets one each of the PC’s basic melee and basic ranged attacks.

The player then chooses one at-will power, one encounter power, one daily power, and one utility power; the stunt double gets all of these, using the PC’s normal numbers. Care should be taken to choose relatively simple and straight-forward powers, but also ones which are ‘iconic’ to the PC. In particular, the stunt double should still be able to fulfill the PC’s role in the party (so, for example, a cleric PC should almost always give his stunt double healing word as the encounter power). Ideally, it should be both easy for anyone to play this stunt double and also feel like the same character as the PC.

Finally, the player chooses any three skills and the stunt double gains those skills at the PC’s normal values; all other skills are rolled at ability score modifier + half level, as normal.

Sometimes you’re reading things online and you come upon an off-the-cuff comment that just deserves to be hoisted up and displayed to the world.

For example, there might be a Good/Evil zero sum rule. So every demon that enters the world allows an angel to enter to balance him. Which btw explains why the forces of good are so reluctant to intervene directly, they don’t want to allow a corosponding number of demons to intervene elsewhere. Or more interestingly it might be sort of the opposite of the planescape assumption. That is to say the prescence of supernatural evil in the mortal world might balance out by moving the whole mortal plane that much closer to goodness.

Andor, What holds the world in balance? (or, why aren’t demons over-running the world?) – EN World

I don’t know about you, but that’s so elegant and perfect that I just want to assimilate it into every setting ever.