Thursday of the Castle Keeper: SIEGE this!

Hey SIEGE engine!  Looking for an easier way into the castle?  Next time try the damn drawbridge!

Presenting the DRAWBRIDGE Universal Action Resolution System©:

Rather than rolling either a 12 or an 18 on d20 to determine success, using the DRAWBRIDGE Universal Action Resolution System© you need to roll an 11 or higher on d20.* This applies to virtually everything you want to attempt**--even combat!  Since not all tasks are created equal, each action you attempt has a challenge level.  But to keep in the drawbridge theme, we'll call it the Bascule--combat Bascules are commonly referred to by the acronym AC.  Just like a real Bascule, which is the counterweight in the drawbridge, the Bascule in the DRAWBRIDGE Universal Action Resolution System© balances the difficulty of the task at hand with the likelihood of the character achieving success. Exceptionally easy tasks can be assigned a negative bascule.

How to use the DRAWBRIDGE Universal Action Resolution System©:

1. Add the Bascule (or opponents AC in combat) to 11; this is your target number.  Roll this number or higher on a 20-sider to succeed.  
2. Add ability bonuses/penalties, combat bonuses, and/or appropriate levels to die roll.  If the total equals or exceeds 11 + Bascule/AC, you did it!  Climb the wall/roll damage/take half damage/whatever.  Roll less than 11 and you get to roll up a new character while the rest of your party is left to the task of parsing out your belongings. 

Converting SIEGE Engine to the DRAWBRIDGE Universal Action Resolution System©: 

Combat: Subtract 10 from AC, add AC to 11 -- this is your target number.  Or, since AC in C&C is derived by adding all your armor bonuses to 10, you can just leave off adding 10 in the first place
Other: depending on the primeness of your attributes you will need to add either 1 (primed) or 7 (un-primed [ouch!]) to the appropriate Bascule.

Next week we'll discuss how to convert AD&D combat to the BARBICAN Combat Resolution System©, a subsidiary of DRAWBRIDGE, LLC and Dice-Chucker Productions.

*This represents a 50% chance of success for a normal--which is to say, not-cool--person.  It is also the minimum requirement for a 0-level human to hit AC10 (no armor) in AD&D; i.e. it is the bedrock upon which all combat is built.  Thac0 can suck itself raw.
**Assuming of course that the activity you are attempting has, in the Castle Keeper's sound opinion, a reasonable chance of failure.  It is up to the Castle Keeper and, to some extent, the players to decide when to use the DRAWBRIDGE Universal Action Resolution System© and when to just role-play the situation instead.

3d6 Wheel of Fortune

Here's a variation on the ol' 3d6 in Order character generation method: 

Roll 'em up and keep 'em in order just like the old testament tells us, but you don't necessarily have to start the order at Strength.  The first number can be placed on the ability of the player's choice (or randomly determined using a 6-sider), but the rest have to follow in the Uniform Ability Order used in your game.  Think of the numbers as the fixed prizes around the Wheel fortune and the pointer indicating the starting point.  For example, you're rolling up your 6 abilities and you get... [hold on, I'm reaching for my dice]:

11, 14, 8, 10, 13, 9

Unaltered AD&D-era ability order (S I W D C Ch--the preferred order here at the ol' Dice-Chucker Cave) dictates that your character would have a high-ish Int and Con, low wisdom, with the rest being middling.   But say you really wanted a strongboy fighter type, you could shift the entire number set 1 to the left, giving him a 14 Str.  But since this aint no pagan orgy free-for-all, the rest of the number set has to shift as well.  The leading 11 now moves to the back of the line at Charisma and the rest take 1 step to the left.  Your character now looks like this:

Dialin' up a character

S 14, I 8, W 10, D 13, C 9, Ch 11

Alternately, to choose starting point at random you could roll a 6 sider to determine where the first number goes, 1 = Str, 2 = Int, etc. (or whatever order you prefer). Using the previous example number set, the player rolls a d6 to determine the starting point... a 3: you would start your number set at the 3rd ability, in this case, wisdom.  Using the same dice results in the same order, your character would look like this:

S 13, I 9, W 11, D 14, C 8, Ch 10

Indeed, if you're the kind of DM who pummels parity into your players with a giant hamhock, you could give all the players the same set of numbers and assign each of them--at your whim of course--a different starting point.

Thursday of the Castle Keeper: C&C--The Stealth-Game

In the four years or so that I've owned the Castles &Crusades rule books I've come to the slow realization that there is a direct correlation between how favorably I view the game and the amount of time passed since I last opened the books.  If it's been a while, the game seems to obtain a reassuringly pleasant glow of warmth, like the steady light from your +2 sword when you're last torch has just sputtered out.  Sadly, whenever I sit down to write a post on C&C I crack open them books to do a little research and, even when the intent was to compose a hagiography of some element of this august game created by the Lords of the Troll, all that kindly warmth turns bilious in my craw and spews out on the screen in the form of yet another excoriating assault on the authors (and illustrator).  So in order to make good my promise of last week to refrain from denigrating the Troll Lord's and their fine RPG, I'm leaving the books on the shelf today.  


Which is convenient, cuz that's kinda' the point of today's post.  When I play "D&D" nowadays, it's a bastardized form of my AD&D and C&C with some vestiges of the Swords & Wizardry game that my friend Bob and I started 2 years ago.  But to watch us, you'd wonder where the hell the C&C comes in.  I don't really use the SIEGE engine -- I've never gotten the hang of ability checks of any sort -- we use the descending AC format (though I secretly convert them to ascending in my head in order to determine to hit rolls, shhhh) and though some of the character classes I use are stripped down versions of their AD&D predecessors that more resemble C&C, the match is definitely not exact.  Indeed, the desert fatigue-colored rulebooks are nowhere to be seen at our gaming table.  So where the hell is C&C in all this mess?

The beauty of C&C, in my humble opinion, is that it aims to be an invisible game, by which I mean a game you can play without ever bothering to reference the rule books.  Sure, by 1983 most people I played with were so familiar with the AD&D rules that we only cracked the Books on the odd occasion to select the type of prostitute we'd encountered or to find the duration of some esoteric druid spells.  But that was after countless hours of poring over every page, digesting every nugget of knowledge, internalizing every table and list, and then countless more hours playing the game and implementing the rules we'd read--and incessantly arguing about them with our friends.  C&C is best when you approach it in a very different manner.  The rules, by comparison to AD&D, are pretty flimsy in that you can take a brief gander at them and decide if it's something worth building on or demolishing.  If it's the latter, you strip it out and do something else.  But if it's the former, then you take it to the shop and thrown it on the lathe for a while or slap a coat of paint it and some designer hinges until it fits your image of a cool game.  It might not really look like C&C when you're done, but the inspiration is still there.

As a for instance, I hate looking at tables, so when my campaign switched over to AD&D for our run through Village of Hommlet, I really wanted a combat system that did not require me to turn to page 74 of the DMG.  I vastly prefer doing simple math in my head to looking stuff up, so I sat down and figured out the mathematical formulas for all of the AD&D combat matrices by class.  Anyone whose tried this knows that, other than fighters, they're fairly arbitrary, especially the monsters.  I never realized before that a gnoll (2 HD) is as good a fighter as a freakin' 5th level paladin!  So I turned to C&C for a simpler solution.  But rather than cop their combat system, I went for the SIEGE Engine instead.  Using 0-level humans versus AC 10 as the baseline, 11 became the target number to score a hit--replacing the "12/18 principal" of C&C.  To this you add a challenge level--in this case more popularly know as "AC".  Because I'm a crusty old bastard and we're playing AD&D, this means I actually have to subtract 10 from the Target AC to determine the "challenge level" but, like I said, I don't mind doing simple math in my head; I figure it probably helps stave off dementia. Anyway, in the end, I'm not really using a C&C rule anymore, but I can still feel its presence in the room when I'm playing.

Wisdom Revised Part 1: The Nose Job

As almost none of you might recall, some time ago I went on a tirade about the poorly conceived wisdom attribute in D&D et. al.  The definitions of wisdom in every version of D&D of which I am knowledgeable--which includes many of the recent "retro clones" but none of the post-Gygax era TSR/WoTC/Hasbro editions--do not, in my opinion, do an adequate job of defining an attribute that stands on solid ground compared with the other five abilities.  So in this two part post, I propose a significant remodel of the ol' "Prime requisite of clerics" that I hope will turn the dilapidated shanty of wisdom into a structurally and functionally sound work of art; one that is useful to non-clerics and actually relevant to the relationship between the religiously inclined and the divine powers that bolster their existence.

Since none of us are pretending that the Wisdom attribute should be a measurement of a character's philosophic or scientific learning--that, Mr. Player, is your job--my first act in the wisdom re-design is to give us a little room to maneuver.  Which is to say, I'd like to alter the terminology--just a bit, mind you; we old schoolers like some change, but it has to be bear enough semblance of the original to fit into our established structure.  Since "wisdom" has distracting real world significance that does not jibe with game mechanics, I propose to you the fresh, 21st century term: Wizdom.  Whaddaya' think?

To get to this newfangled yet familiar term, I took a cue from the food additives industry; just as "creme" and "chick'n" evoke an image of what we are eating but are removed in substance from the source material, wizdom provides pleasing familiarity with our gaming roots and acknowledgment of some sort of mental trait, but by merely swapping the "s" for a "z" we are freed from the baggage associated with the standard English word.  Yet unlike cream manque or poultry's soy-based doppelganger, wizdom, I believe, shall improve upon the original; providing a more satisfying, grounded gaming attribute--concrete in scope yet delightful to the palate.  Enjoy!